


Up Jumped the Devil

by clockheartedcrocodile



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Angst, Bathing/Washing, Body Worship, Catholic Guilt, Domestic Fluff, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Literal Sleeping Together, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Masturbation, Racist Language, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sharing a Bed, Sleep Deprivation, Slow Burn, Southern Gothic AU, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:01:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 45,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13832790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockheartedcrocodile/pseuds/clockheartedcrocodile
Summary: The murmuring of the crowd withers into a concerned hush as Bennett kneels beside the body. He touches the preacher’s sun-scarred wrist, then his swollen neck. The congregation knows what Bennett will say before he says it; they can see it in the sudden deflation of his posture, and his low, stern exhale of disappointment.Bennet stands up slowly, leaning heavily on his cane to steady himself.“It seems,” he says, in a tone suggesting some great and terrible inconvenience, “that we shall have to find a new preacher.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I finally have enough of this done that I feel comfortable with starting to upload chapters. Instead of the "a couple of really long chapters" option, I've elected to go with more chapters, but shorter ones. This is shaping up to be one of the longest fics I've ever written. The title comes from “Up Jumped the Devil,” my favorite Nick Cave song.

Every third Sunday, the preacher of Snakespring stands before his parish and says, “The Lord has blessed me, brothers and sisters in Christ.”

And all God’s people say, “Amen.”

“I do not run from death, nor do I allow it dominion over my life! I have been anointed by God, and God is in me this morning!”

“Amen!” say the people. “Amen!”

“Glory to God!” says the preacher. “Glory to He whose plan is perfect and undeniable! Glory to He who spared St. Paul from the bite of the serpent, and Glory to He who will now do the same for me!”

“Hallelujah, amen!”

“And so it is!” says the preacher, and this is where the Box comes in.

It’s made of wood and glass, about three feet long, and it contains a nest of diamondback rattlers. The rattlers have come all the way from Arizona, but the Box came from right here, and here it has stayed for near a century, ever since the town’s noble founder, Hephaestus Shaw, struck the earth like Moses and caused it to spill forth serpents instead of water. Snakespring, USA. And every third Sunday since, the preacher of the town plunges his hands down into a knot of serpents, and he does not die.

This has gone on for years.

“I hold death,” says the preacher of Snakespring, “in my very hands. I hold it, and do I die, brothers and sisters?”

“No!”

“Has my God forsaken me?”

“No!”

The rattler he’s picked today is a wicked-looking thing, a thick rope of brown and gray muscle crusted with flaky scales. Its tail makes a sound like dice in a cup, and its eyes are black as the spaces between stars. It’s an ugly creature.

This particular priest has been the preacher of this town for five years, and never, not once, has God failed to protect him from the bite of a diamondback. Not until today.

Today he hits the ground with a spit and a gurgle. His face is by turns flushed and bloodless; he chokes on his tongue, he spasms. People start panicking as his fingers scrabble uselessly at the hardwood floor of his church. The snake slips from his hand and makes a mad, slithery dash for the nearest wall. No one sees where it went, or what it did when it got there.

Mrs. Rance yells for Dr. Bennett, who knows something about everything, and the nervous churchgoers part for him as he comes click-clacking up the isle, stately despite his cane, and carrying himself with a certain grandeur that makes him seem older than he is. He’s a short, solid man with flinty eyes and a dangerous jaw. His handshakes are considered fatal.

The murmuring of the crowd withers into a concerned hush as Bennett kneels beside the body. He touches the preacher’s sun-scarred wrist, then his swollen neck. The congregation knows what Bennett will say before he says it; they can see it in the sudden deflation of his posture, and his low, stern exhale of disappointment.

Bennet stands up slowly, leaning heavily on his cane to steady himself.

“It seems,” he says, in a tone suggesting some great and terrible inconvenience, “that we shall have to find a new preacher.”

***

Father Tomas Ortega is the most interesting thing to happen to Snakespring in months.

Everyone has something to say about him. The mayor says he’s coming on a trial basis only. He’ll stay long enough to see if the parish is “for him,” and when he sees that it’s not, he’ll go back to the city. The scout master says that the last thing they need in this town is a daisy fresh south-of-the-border priest who thinks he’s special. The schoolteacher says she doesn’t like his face. She is hard pressed to find people who agree with her.

There is only one point on which there is a general consensus. Why a priest from inner city Chicago should get it into his head that he should move halfway across the country to hold mass for a middle-of-nowhere parish like St. Raphael’s, no one could begin to guess.

Tomas steps off the train late on Wednesday evening with a smile and two big suitcases. He’s greeted by a man in a dusty black suit and a bowler hat. His host holds out his hand stiffly and introduces himself as a Catholic first and a doctor second.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Bennett,” says Tomas, who can hold his own in any handshake.

“The pleasure is mine, Father,” says Bennett. “I’m glad you’ve arrived so quickly. In the absence of a preacher, the townsfolk have been turning to me for guidance, and I’m afraid that’s not really my area.”

They hold polite conversation as Tomas heaves his luggage into the back of Bennett’s car, but they spend the majority of the drive in silence. Tomas reclines his seat a little and gazes out the window at the scenery. Not that there’s much to look at. Only corn.

“How far does the corn go?” he asks.

“Miles.”

Snakespring is a forty-five minute drive from the train station. Bennett confides to him privately that he hasn’t driven this road in more than three years. “I have everything I need to live comfortably in town,” he says. “It grows tedious at times, seeing the same faces every day, but I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

“You seem cultured,” Tomas says cautiously, wondering if he’s about to offend. “I can’t help feeling you’d be much more at home in the city.”

“So would you,” says Bennett, “and yet, here you are. Why?”

Tomas swallows, and looks straight ahead at the bumpy road just barely illuminated by Bennett’s headlights. He can see buildings looming from the corn now, gray and stunted and sloping. “I was called by God to come here,” he says eventually, because if he says it enough times it will become true.

“Good,” says Bennett. “Good.”

He takes them through the center of town, past a row of glass-fronted shops and creaky, wood-framed houses. “Aren’t we stopping?” asks Tomas.

“Not just yet.”

***

The preacher, God rest his soul, had lived alone in a two-story refurbished farmhouse that had been provided to him by the Church. Tomas is dumbstruck when he sees it, resplendent in its peeling white paint and billowing curtains. He catches a glimpse of bats fluttering behind the attic window, and when Bennett unlocks the door for him, Tomas is frankly shocked to find the interior already furnished and somewhat clean. Bennett assures him that it’s only temporary in a tone that confirms to Tomas that it is not, but Tomas fills his ears with praise and gratitude until the stiffness in Bennett’s posture relaxes a little, a gesture which Tomas chooses to interpret as pleased embarrassment.

There’s no land to speak of, but there’s a rickety fence bravely attempting to hold back the corn, leaving Tomas with a certain amount of dusty lot and several withered trees. The front porch creaks dangerously under Tomas’ boots as he leans against the railing. He tries not to think of what it will be like living here for the next year, or two years, or ten. And of course, there are the snakes to consider.

Maybe he shouldn’t have come here at all.

But Tomas pushes that thought from his mind at once. God is with him, and Tomas has experience rebuilding dying parishes. It’s good work, and work that he loves, no matter what Olivia might say about it.

Olivia. He should call her, let her know he’s arrived safely.

Tomas watches Bennett’s car pull out of the lot and disappear down the road, and only after the sound of his tires diminishes into the distance does Tomas realize how loud the corn is. It rustles ceaselessly in the wind, a pleasant counterpoint to Chicago’s shrieks, squeaks, and squeals.

The interior of the house is dark and oddly cold, and some of the furniture is still overthrown with white sheets. Tomas takes the clunky landline off the wall and twirls the curly cord around his fingers. He wonders how a house that until so recently had been occupied could look so disused.

Olivia doesn’t pick up the phone. Tomas realizes with some embarrassment that she wouldn’t know this number. _“Hola, Olivia, vine aquí a salvo,”_ he says after the tone. _“Ya te extraño. Este es mi nuevo número, y . . . Te hablaré por la mañana.”_

With this final deed done, there’s nothing to do but collapse into bed in exhaustion. Tomas is dimly aware that this is the bed of a dead man, but at the moment he can’t bring himself to care. Instead he strips down to his briefs and makes himself as comfortable as he can, resolving to buy a new mattress first thing Thursday morning.

His last thought before he falls asleep is of the homily he’s going to give on Sunday, if it will be good enough, if it will impress the people of the town. Soon he slips into the easy embrace of sleep, and forgets about it.

As he sleeps, he dreams.

***

_There’s a sour-sweet wind blowing from the West, and with it comes the Devil._

_Here he comes, walking through the corn, salting the earth with every step. Even now, in this enlightened age, the Devil prefers to walk._

_He stops and tastes the air. The sour-sweet wind tugs at his coat. It whips through the corn, and it scatters the birds._

_The Devil is all things to all people._

_He looks exactly how you think he looks._

_The Devil resumes his pace, no quicker than before. The Devil never hurries. He is always on time._

_There is something sleeping under Snakespring._

_The Devil is going to visit it._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's that? 6k of Plot Exposition that no one asked for? Why, don't mind if I do.

There’s a potluck at the church this morning, so the congregation can meet the new preacher. Tomas, who has never missed a church social in his life, spends twenty minutes digging through his luggage for something to wear, and finally settles on a dark red cardigan, just this shy of too snug, which he tugs on over his clericals. He pushes last night’s dream from his mind- it meant nothing. An odd occurrence, maybe, but hardly an omen.

The house, which had seemed so unendurably lonely last night, seems a little warmer when he opens the curtains in the living room and lets the sunlight gleam through the water-spotted windows. The floral yellow wallpaper is fading, but pretty, and Tomas things idly of how all the white-sheeted furniture resembles oddly-shaped ghosts in the morning light.

The better part of the morning is spent getting to know the place a little better. The greasy tiles on the bathroom floor, the old refrigerator humming quietly in the kitchen, the bedroom with its wide windows almost fused shut from lack of airing out. Tomas drinks in every detail, memorizing it, cataloguing it. This is his now. This is where he lives. He wonders how long it will take him to grow accustomed to that fact.

The door to the attic has been poorly painted with great gobs of white paint, already peeling. Tomas has to tug on the handle before the door pops open, rasping roughly in the doorframe. It leads directly unto a staircase, too narrow for comfort, with uneven wooden steps that make Tomas, who is not a nervous man, feel vaguely uncomfortable about climbing them.

He sets one foot on the bottom step. It creaks, but holds his weight. So far, so good. At the top of the stairs there’s a second door, and this one opens somewhat easier than the first. The stairs are at such a steep incline that Tomas is almost tempted to put his hands out to touch the steps, cat-like, as he ascends them.

The attic opens out into a wide, surprisingly airy room, if a little cramped. Tomas thought he had seen bats in the window when he first arrived with Bennett, but there are no bats here now. Only floorboards painted the same ugly white as the door, and a tall, narrow window looking out over the dusty lot outside, and the porch directly below it. Most of the personal effects have been cleared away, but there are a few taped-up cardboard boxes here and there, and a cot in the corner. There’s a squat, narrow bookshelf, with the shelves bowing under the weight of far too many crammed-in Christmas decorations. There’s no light, but the sun casts light enough through the curtains. The window sill’s spotted with dead flies.

Tomas tests the cot with his hand before sitting down, half expecting a puff of dust and a comical crunching of springs. It’s surprisingly soft, if a little flat. He swings his legs up and rolls onto his back, staring at the low roof of the attic. Someone must have slept here. Maybe several someones; there were no other guest rooms in the house.

Tomas has already knelt for his morning prayers today, but he feels the urge to do so again now.

He kneels by the window and looks out at the weary trees. The fence, already on its last legs. The _corn._ A longing for Chicago hits him so suddenly and so painfully that for a moment, Tomas allows himself a moment of grief. Grief for what, he does not know. Olivia, maybe. Luis. His parish.

“Father God,” he murmurs into his clasped hands. “Whatever I do this day, let me honor You. I desire nothing more than to be a good servant for You, my Lord. I pray that this new parish might embrace me, and I, them. Whatever awaits me here, God, if it be Your will, I welcome it with open arms.”

 

There’s a woman waiting for him outside the church, shifting from foot to foot in nervous agitation as she waits. Her boots, scuffed and water-damaged, are making a furrow in the dirt outside the door. She perks up when she sees Tomas and waves at him, clay-beaded bracelets rattling merrily on her arm.

“Father Tomas!” she says, like he’s the best thing to happen to her all week. “Did you get here safely? How have you been settlin’ in? It was Dr. Bennett who moved you into the old preacher’s house, wasn’t it so? Bless him, it should’ve been me. But I’ve had so much on my mind recently, preacher, putting this whole ordeal together, and- oh,” she says, pleasantly surprised when Tomas hugs her. “Hello there.”

“It is so good to meet you,” says Tomas, letting her go and smiling at her, hoping his excitement isn’t too infectious. “You must be my new assistant, Tara.”

“You remembered!” she says, delighted. “I’m glad to hear it. You better brace yourself,” and here she leans towards him, her hand by her mouth in a conspiratorial way, “you’ve got a lot of people to meet in there, so put on your most charming smile.”

“I always do,” says Tomas, which gets another laugh out of her. “I am yours for the day. Show me hands, and I will shake them.”

“That’s the spirit,” Tara says, taking his arm. “Come on. I want to be the one to introduce you.”

 

It’s a quiet affair, but with a lot of passion behind it. All the pews have been moved back in the fellowship hall, allowing for the setting up of several of that particular kind of white plastic church table that needs a swift kick in the legs before it unfolds properly. Snacks on the first table, all the way up to desserts on the third. Tomas immediately feels concerned that he didn’t bring anything, but Tara squeezes his arm and assures him that for once, this is about _him._

Tomas doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he can’t afford to enjoy it, even for a moment. If he enjoys it a little, then he’ll enjoy it too much, and that’s the path that leads to hubris. Tomas knows himself too well for that.

All in all it’s a far more enthusiastic welcome than any Tomas could have anticipated, though Tara takes care to inform him that this is less than half the congregation. Tomas, who has been there for ten minutes and is halfway through one of the little roast beef wraps with the toothpicks in them, swallows awkwardly and covers his mouth with a napkin. “Less than half?”

“Nearly everyone in this town is a churchgoer, Father,” she says, with no small amount of pride. “I daresay it’s a bit different from what you’re used to in Chicago.”

And it is, vastly so. Everyone wants to shake his hand. Everyone wants to show him their kids. Tara informs him with barely disguised delight that there won’t be an empty pew in the church come next Sunday. “Don’t go gettin’ a big head over it,” she says, in an airy, half-joking voice, but it hits Tomas harder than he believes she meant it to.

He stands over near the lemonade and tries to make himself as open and available as possible. Tara provides helpful commentary as Tomas scans the crowd for familiar faces, but unfortunately Dr. Bennett is nowhere to be seen. “That’s Maria Walters,” she whispers hurriedly, as Tomas finds himself approached by a tall, proud-looking woman, who smiles at him with half-closed eyes and a languid expression. “She’s the richest person in town, ‘part from Dr. Bennett. Her family practically owns-”

“Father Tomas,” Maria says pleasantly, shaking his hand. Her pearls gleam off-white and expensive around her neck. “Welcome to St. Raphael’s. I’m sure you’re going to do wonderful things with the place. You know who I am?”

“Of course I do,” says Tomas smoothly. “You are Maria Walters, are you not?”

Her face twitches. Just for the briefest moment, but Tomas sees it. Then it falls back to pleasant, placid simplicity. “Oh, forgive me,” she says. “I thought you were from Chicago.”

“I am,” says Tomas, who has had this conversation before and is no longer wary of it.

“Oh.”

“I was born there, but raised in Mexico. I later returned as a young man to better prepare myself for my calling.”

“I see,” says Maria. She smiles. “Well, I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job.”

“Thank you.”

“Your English is excellent.”

“Thank you,” Tomas says again, his voice carefully pleasant. He hopes that she likes him. He can tell that he will need her to like him.

He shakes innumerable hands as he meets men, women, families. On the whole, people do seem to like him, for which he is relieved. Mrs. Rance especially, who shakes his hand firmly with both of her own and tells him he’ll have no shortage of church volunteers to help him with anything he may need to get done. Tomas meets her husband too, a sleepy-eyed, gray-haired man who reminds him of an illustration he once saw in an old alphabet book. His name is Henry, and before he’s even through with their handshake he’s apologizing for any odd noises or disturbances during the Sunday service.

“I have to stand up every now and then,” he says with a rueful smile. “Sometimes I just have to get a little fresh air, you know. Get my blood circulating.”

“It’s fine, it’s no trouble,” Tomas says warmly, thinking back to what Mrs. Rance- Angela- had said. _Henry,_ she said, _is suffering from a brain injury. A beam fell on him when he was putting up the barn, and he hasn’t been quite right since._

Their handshake has gone on way too long. Tomas is just about to ask about Henry’s kids when Henry squeezes him tighter and says, “He’ll be here in three days.”

“I’m sorry?” says Tomas cautiously.

“Father Marcus.”

Tomas stares at him. Henry stares back with his tired eyes, and doesn’t say anything.

“I’m . . . sorry,” Tomas says again, slowly. “I don’t know who that is.”

“Know who what is?”

“. . . What?”

“Father Tomas!” cries a harried-sounding voice, and Tomas glances up to see a woman in an oversized green raincoat pushing her way through the crowd, her eyes wide and her smile wider.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Henry,” Tomas says sincerely, reaching out squeeze Henry’s shoulder. “If you would like to speak with me further at any time, my door is always open . . . Good morning!”

He says this last to the the woman who has just taken his hand and wrung it like the neck of a rabbit. “It’s an honor to meet you, Father,” she says. “We’re all still so shaken up about the death of the old preacher, but I just _know_ you’re going to do a wonderful job.”

“Thank you,” says Tomas. “Mrs. . . ?”

“Graham,” she says, eyes shining brightly. “Mrs. Graham.”

“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Graham, it’s such a blessing to have you here. Tara tells me you don’t get out of the house much. Back in Chicago I used to make visits to the homes of those who weren’t able to come to church on Sunday, perhaps you’d like it if I . . ?”

“Oh no, no,” says Mrs. Graham, as Tomas gently extricates his hand from her grip. “That won’t do at all, I’m afraid. My daughter is terribly ill, you see. A disease of the blood. Refuses to see anyone.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tomas says sincerely. “I suppose you’ve consulted with Dr. Bennett?”

“Oh,” says Mrs. Graham. “Yes, of course.”

She looks vaguely uncomfortable at the thought. Tomas glances behind her and sees, to his pleasant surprise, that Bennett’s finally arrived. He’s chatting with a handsome, thin-figured man in red flannel, and an older, sturdier gentleman in the far corner of the hall. “Ah,” he says brightly. “Speak of the Devil. Pardon me,” he adds hastily, when Mrs. Graham lets out a surprised splutter.

She glances over her shoulder at the older gentleman. “That’s Sheriff Morrow,” she says, in a tight little voice that suggests Sheriff Morrow has done her some grievous personal wrong. “He’s _agnostic.”_

“I see.”

_“I see?_ That’s all you have to say?”

“I mean . . . yes,” Tomas says, bewildered. “I suppose I could ask what he’s doing here, if he has no vested interest in St. Raphael’s . . .”

Mrs. Graham gives a distracted little wave of the hand. “He always knows what’s going on,” she says with a nervous laugh. “Everywhere and nowhere, that one. Getting into, into people’s personal, private-” Tomas watches as, overwhelmed with emotion, she takes a napkin off one of the tables and starts worrying it between her fingers. Her eyes brighten up after a moment of this. “Father Tomas?”

“Hmm?”

“I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Father Marcus, are you?”

“I . . . no?” Tomas says weakly. “Mr. Rance said something about him, just now . . .”

“Oh,” says Mrs. Graham, visibly disappointed. “I see. I thought . . . well I thought you’d know him. Or about him, at least. Being a preacher.”

She’s tearing the napkin into strips now. _Ri-i-ip._ “Is he from a neighboring parish?” Tomas asks, unable to tear his eyes away from her hands.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Graham says. “The _world_ is his parish.”

“Ah.”

“He’s been going around these parts you know, casting out _evil spirits,”_ she says. This last is said in a hushed whisper, as though afraid to say such a thing under a church roof.

Tomas blinks. He can see over her shoulder that Bennett has noticed them. He’s coming over, the crowd parting for him like the Red Sea as his cane click-clicks across the ground. The man in the flannel is with him and the sheriff is following after, hands on his hips, looking around the fellowship hall with the familiar fascination of someone who is rarely inside a church.

“That’s fascinating, Mrs. Graham,” Tomas says. “Demons are a . . . well, they’re a subject of a lot of controversy in the Catholic Church.”

“What do you mean?” says Mrs. Graham, her eyes narrowing.

Tomas opens his mouth to respond but before he can, Bennett and Morrow have insinuated themselves into their conversation. “Good morning, Father,” says Bennett coolly. “I trust you’ve settled in alright?”

“Well enough,” says Tomas, too distracted by Mrs. Graham, who, at the sight of Sheriff Morrow coming closer, has gone as pale as a cotton sheet.

“Excuse me,” she says weakly, and then she’s gone, stopping by the dessert table long enough to fold up some lemon squares in the shredded remains of her napkin before she starts weaving through the crowd.

Bennett turns to Tomas. “I thought you could use some help.”

“Thank you.”

“This is Sheriff Morrow,” says Bennett, “and Andrew Kim. We’ve just been discussing you.”

“Pleasure,” says Morrow, shaking Tomas’ hand, which is beginning to chafe from all this attention. He’s tall, solidly built, with bright, warm eyes and a handshake to rival Dr. Bennett’s. He gives out smiles like they’re candy, and Tomas, who has never met a sheriff before, is pleasantly surprised by his demeanor. He wonders what in the world could possibly make Mrs. Graham not like him.

Andrew Kim has sad eyes and a charming smile, and Tomas realizes too late when he goes to shake his hand that he has streaks of paint on his fingers. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says pleasantly. “The kids, you know.”

“Mr. Kim has been pestering St. Raphael’s for years about establishing a youth outreach program here,” Bennett explains.

“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” says Tomas, folding his hands in front of him. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“Well,” says Andy, his eyes brightening. “I was thinking . . . oh,” he says, glancing down, and Tomas realizes there’s a small child down there, hiding behind Andy’s legs. “Do you want to say hi?”

Tomas feels a little pang in his heart for Luis. He had been shy too, when he was that age. He had hid behind Tomas’ legs just the same.

“This is my youngest, Grace,” says Andy Kim, reaching down and gently steering the little girl out from behind him. Her face is moon-white, and her eyes stare out of it like holes cut in sackcloth. The pang in Tomas’ heart wilts; he wonders if his eye is twitching, as it does when he’s uncomfortable.

There’s no reason to be afraid of a child.

“Say hello, Grace,” says Andy. Grace hides her face against his leg, and Andy smiles in a rueful, but not unkind way. “She’s shy,” he clarifies to Tomas, gently patting her hair. “She wandered out into the cornfield not long ago and she’s still kind of freaked out. Doesn’t even want to leave the house anymore.”

“Freaked out,” says Tomas. “Okay.”

“It’s been a real pleasure to meet you, Father. We don’t see a lot of new faces in Snakespring.”

“Well, I’m glad to be here.”

“Yeah,” Andy nods, smiling. “Yeah. It’ll be real nice for Shelby too. Hasn’t had anyone to look up to, spiritually speaking.”

“I’d be happy to get to know him,” Tomas says sincerely. “Please, tell him he’s free to come by any time.”

“I will. I surely will. Hey,” Andy says, this last directed at Grace, who is still tightly holding his hand. “Do you want to go see if there are any of those little cookies left? Will that cheer you up some?”

She looks back over her shoulder at Tomas as they leave for the desserts table. For a moment, Tomas swears he sees her smile.

 

The hot wind reeks as Tomas makes his way home, a long day of meeting people and exploring the town long behind him. The streets and side-streets are confusing to a fault, even in a town so small. As he packed his bags in Chicago, he’d made up his mind not to draw up a map for himself. What kind of preacher would he be if he couldn’t even memorize a town so small as this one?

He’s beginning to regret that decision now, but as he walks home, he resolves to put the thought out of his mind. He has enough to deal with, moving into a new house.

The air stinks of ash and animal shit. The sun is going down, bathing the town a vibrant, melted-popsicle orange. It colors everything it touches, makes the whole town seem hot and sugary. In time, Tomas hopes, he’ll grow to enjoy it.

The house seems even emptier when he gets there. His feet ache after the walk, and it only occurs to him now that he should probably think about getting a car.

Tomas fumbles with the key in the lock, drops it, picks it up and tries again. There’s a windswept rocking chair on the porch, creaking quietly to itself, and Tomas wonders if the old preacher had spent many evenings hear, looking out at the barren yard and not much else.

Still, the sunsets are beautiful. And it won’t do to complain about the yard. It’s land, and he’s lived in a cramped Chicago apartment for years. Maybe he could start a garden.

Tomas gets inside and locks the door behind him, leaving his shoes on the doormat as he shuffles, tired, into the bathroom. Ten minutes later and he’s in the bedroom at last, kneeling by the bed for his evening rituals. The floorboards creak under his knees. Outside, he hears nothing but the soft rustling of cornstalks, and the cough of an occasional crow. It’s good to be kneeling again. He needs this time with God.

“Father God, I pray that You will make me worthy of my calling,” Tomas prays. Hands clasped, head bowed. This is the holiest he ever feels. “I pray that I might be a satisfactory preacher for Your children whom I met in town today, and that You will shape me to this end, according to Your will. That through me, Your will might be done on this earth. I pray that in all things, I will live up to You and honor You, Whom I love with all the adoration of my soul. Amen.”

He lingers awake for a long time before he falls asleep, curled up in bed and listening to the clock on the wall tick, tick, tick.

 

_The Devil comes from the West, and the exorcist follows after him._

_Here he comes, walking through the corn. His feet fit in the tracks of the Devil’s shoes as though they were made for him._

_He stops, and drops to one knee, digging his fingers into the soft earth as though to test it. Overhead, birds fly screaming from the East. Something’s given them a fright._

_The exorcist gets to his feet again, his hands in his pockets, his back curved in a slouch. He’d make a fine scarecrow, dark and crooked against the swaying corn. He scuffs out the Devil’s footprints with his boot and walks back the way he came, jangling his keys carelessly in his pocket as he goes._

_The Devil went down to Snakespring._

_The exorcist is going to catch him._

 

Tomas tugs his robe on and steps blinking into the early-morning light. He squints up at the sky, looking for what, he does not know. Nothing but clear, smogless blue. It’s been a long time since Tomas has seen a clear sky.

Another dream last night.

There’s a newspaper tossed against his door. An honest-to-God newspaper. Tomas picks it up and glances over his shoulder, as if afraid a boy in a striped shirt and baseball cap is going to pop over the fence and demand payment.

Nothing. So he goes inside. Drops the newspaper on the table and feels an awful clenching and unclenching in his belly, bad enough that Tomas has to lean on the table and take a moment just to breathe. The sensation rides through him like a cresting wave, and when it finally passes, Tomas lingers at the table for a moment just in case it comes back.

He’s sick. He must be. It’s the shock of the country air.

Tomas tries to brush it off, leaving the newspaper on the table and peeling off his robe to go take a shower. He showers in silence, the water cold but not unbearable, and it only occurs to him after he’s finished toweling off his hair that he forgot to go for a run this morning.

He hasn’t forgotten to go for a run since he was in school.

Tomas gets dressed with measured fastidiousness, going through the motions while his mind is preoccupied elsewhere. “I’m sick,” he says aloud. “I’m sick, that’s all it is. I’m sick and dreaming.”

He kneels by the window for his morning rituals, and bows his head over his clasped hands.

“Holy Father,” he says, “I do not know what will happen to me today. I only know that nothing will happen that was not foreseen by You, and directed for my greater good from all eternity. I adore Your holy and unfathomable plans, and submit to them with all my heart for love of You, the Pope, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Tomas hesitates.

_Amen,_ he thinks, _amen,_ but he has more to say.

Tomas takes a deep breath. “Father,” he begins. “I pray for Your protection over me, and over my house. I pray that You will continue to guide me along Your destined path for my life. And I pray that if I am not enough . . .”

It’s an ugly thought, and one that Tomas would dare not voice, if it were anyone else listening.

“. . . that You might send someone greater than I, who might better shape me according to Your design. Amen.”

 

The day passes in a hazy blur.

Tomas spends it in his new office at the church, writing sermons and familiarizing himself with a new work environment, but he can barely concentrate. He gets up to use the toilet almost every hour. He drinks more water in an effort to stay hydrated, but it doesn’t help.

It’s not even a sickness, exactly. It’s a pervasive uneasiness that makes Tomas want to look over his shoulder, or under his bed. A kind of creeping horror.

Standing before his front door again at the end of the day, as the sun goes down over the corn, Tomas thinks he might throw up.

_Something is watching me._

That can’t be it. It can’t be.

_It is._

Tomas turns the key in the lock with a shaky hand. The key scratches the metal around the lock before going in.

_Something is watching me._

Tomas is about to open the door when he remembers his boyhood in Mexico. When he was afraid of a monster behind a door, he used to throw the door open violently and cry _¡Te veo!_ so he would scare the monster first.

It would be absurd to do that now.

Tomas takes a deep breath, and throws the door open. _“¡Te veo!”_

Nothing. A silent entryway, opening unto a silent kitchen, a silent hall and living room.

Tomas shuffles inside, feeling rather stupid, and locks the door behind him. When he gets on his knees to pray not long after, his mind is completely blank. _How do I pray about this?_

“Father God,” he says weakly. He says nothing else.

That night, he buries his face in his pillow, and hopes his dreams will bring him relief.

 

_This one is different from the other dreams._

_Heaven hold him, this is worse._

_He scrambles for a handhold on the rocks as he’s dragged farther down, his fingernails scrabbling on the chalky stone. One of them snaps, and the pain shoots up his arm, far too much pain for only a broken nail. He’s being pulled down, down, down, through the loamy earth and the crumbling rocks. Underground crystals gleam in the darkness like stars, and then go out._

_His legs are caught in something heavy and muscular. It’s winding up his legs, pinning them together, dragging him down, and God its disgusting, he can feel that whatever it is is viscous and dripping, oozing down his legs as it drags him further into the black._

_He can’t breathe._

_He’s going to die here, under the earth. Smothered by the thing that sleeps under Snakespring._

_He opens his mouth to scream, and it fills with dirt. His throat constricts and a weight presses down on his chest, so heavy, threatening to-_

crack his ribs if he breathes the wrong way, but he can’t move, his arms are limp and dead against the sheets as something sits on his chest and squeezes tightly around his throat, and this is the end, this is the end for him, and as Tomas’ eyes roll back in his head he thinks one last, desperate thought.

_If it is Your will for me._

And like that, as easy as waking up, the weight is gone. The hands around his neck are gone, and clear, clean air rushes into Tomas’ lungs so fast that his throat burns with the pain of it.

He is alone.

His eyes are burning, and the sheets under him are drenched with sweat. His heart is thundering in his chest, his cock half-hard out of fear. He feels like he’s going to faint.

“Something is here,” Tomas whispers, terrified, into the early morning gloom. “Something is _sleeping here.”_

 

Tomas had intended to spend Saturday buying groceries and exploring the town a little more, familiarizing himself with every slumping wooden house and dusty doorway, but he’s barely out of bed before he’s kneeling by the window, his head bowed, eyes shut tight.

“Father,” he whispers into his clasped hands, “Father, You are good, and holy, and just. Strengthen me in the power of Your might, oh Lord, dress me in Your armor that I might stand firm against the schemes of the Devil. Something is sleeping under this town, oh Lord, I pray that You might give me the courage and the wherewithal to stand against it. It has given me a dream, unlike the two dreams that came before it. This dream almost killed me. My struggle is not against flesh and blood, oh Lord, but against the tainted darkness of the world. If it is Your will for me that I stay here, and continue to serve this town, I ask that You send me a sign. Anything, anything, oh Lord. Just give me a sign that I might be able to stand against the spiritual wickedness of this place. In the name of Jesus Christ our Savior, and in the name of the Holy Virgin, amen.”

He prays and fasts from dawn till dusk, as the sun shifts position outside the window and and shadows of his bedroom move and change.

 

It’s Sunday. The most important day of the week.

Tomas opens the church doors, letting his new congregation filter out into the street. It had been a good sermon, one that he had been poring over for weeks before he left Chicago, desperate to make a good impression on his first day. An engine had roared outside halfway through it, but Tomas had continued unperturbed. He had preached over louder disruptions in the city.

Tomas stands stock still as his congregation filters out into the street around him. Several of them try to thank him and wish him a blessed Sunday, but he barely hears, his gaze fixed on the man standing across the street.

It’s him.

The man from his dream. The one who followed the Devil from the West.

He’s even taller in person. Tall and scarred and weather-beaten, like a scarecrow that’s stood too long against the elements. His blond hair is graying and buzzed nearly down to his skull, and his arms are folded as he leans against his motorcycle and watches St. Raphael’s empty out into the Sunday morning sun. He’s wearing black leather and a politely curious expression.

Tomas feels cut to the quick by that expression. Like a butterfly pinned to a board.

It’s uncomfortable, being fixed with a look of such curious intensity. Tomas feels the urge to look away, and instead of indulging it, he forces himself to make eye contact. He crosses the street with swift, purposeful strides.

“I’m afraid you just missed the service,” he says fiercely.

“That’s a shame,” says the stranger with a crooked grin. His eyes are the color of worn-out denim. “I would’ve liked to hear it.”

“I certainly heard you.”

“Yeah, well. Apologies for that.”

There’s no doubt in Tomas mind; it’s the same man. _He’ll be here in three days,_ Henry had said. Tomas doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t dare hope it’s something divine.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, finally.

The stranger tilts his head and breathes deeply, seeming to enjoy the smoky smell of the Snakespring air. “Just going from town to town,” he says, “looking for different kinds of dust to choke on.” He leans against his motorcycle and stretches his mile-long legs out in front of him. “You’re the only preacher in town, yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Tomas, raising his chin in defiance. “This is my parish.”

“I hope you’re up for it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Being the only preacher in a small town like this takes a lot of guts. You need to be prepared to do things you might not otherwise do,” says the stranger. Tomas wonders if he’s being funny, but his face is deadly serious when he speaks. “These people are looking to you for guidance. To be their shepherd. Are you a good preacher, Tomas?”

“I am a very good preacher.”

The corner of his mouth quirks up. “The Lord has tested you and you have measured up, I see.”

“Are you a man of faith?”

His grin widens. He reaches for the zipper at his throat and drags it down, down, down, and Tomas’ eyes follow the movement before they fixate on the collar at his throat.

For a moment, Tomas is at a loss for words. Then, “You’re the man they’ve all been talking about.”

“Small-town folk do like to gossip.”

“They say you’ve been riding around the country, casting out unclean spirits. Is this true?”

“True as the word of God, darling.”

The man- _Marcus Keane-_ tilts his head and squints at the sun. Tomas watches his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “Can you feel it?” he says, after a long moment.

Tomas stomach drops into his shoes. He knows what he means. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does.

He means the sour-sweet wind from the West.

He means the rumbling in the earth.

He means the thing on his chest, that cramping, crushing weight that almost killed him. That _nightmare_ that almost killed him.

Tomas’ collar feels very, very tight all of a sudden. He grabs Marcus’ arm and forces him to look him in the eye. He can feel Marcus stiffen under his hand, then relax. “What do you know about it?” Tomas whispers fervently.

“I know something ugly passed this way,” says Marcus, his eyes glittering like bluebottle flies. “I’m following it. Been following it for a good long while now.”

_I know,_ thinks Tomas, _I saw you in a dream,_ but he doesn’t say it out loud.

Tomas glances up at the remaining parishioners still scattered in various clusters of conversation outside the church. He lowers his voice to avoid being overheard. “I have felt something. A presence, almost. Something is sleeping under the town.”

“Sleeping?” Marcus whispers back, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Sleeping under the town?”

“Yes,” says Tomas plainly.

It feels easy to tell him this. Too easy. Tomas feels for a moment that he ought to be frightened of how easily conversation comes to him, but he almost doesn’t want to. Not when this out-of-town stranger was looking at Tomas with such sincere fascination. His attention is making Tomas feel light-headed.

“Will you being staying long?” Tomas asks.

“If you’re lucky, no,” says Marcus, somewhat ambiguously. “I’ll be here until I’m no longer needed.”

“Do you have somewhere to stay?”

Marcus gives him a curious look. “No,” he says finally. “I was going to have a kip at one of the local spots.”

“You could stay with me,” Tomas says. “I have more than enough space.”

“You’re serious?”

“It’s no trouble,” says Tomas. _I don’t want to be alone in that house._ "Call it Christian charity, if you like."

Marcus looks at him like he can’t believe Tomas is real. He opens his mouth, closes it again. Then, “Alright, thank you,” and a wince, as though that wasn’t what he’d intended to say.

“I don’t live far,” says Tomas. “There’s even a bed you can take. You’ve probably slept on enough couches.”

“Thank you,” says Marcus. The sincerity in his voice is overwhelming.

“Probably you think I am being a gentleman,” Tomas says, wondering why he’s still talking, and if the cot in the attic is comfortable, “being a nice person, but actually that bed used to belong to a dead man.”

Marcus _laughs._


	3. Chapter 3

Tomas finds two chipped mugs at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. He surreptitiously checks them for dead wasps, and hopes Marcus doesn’t notice. “Sugar?”

Marcus lets out a little snort of laughter, which Tomas takes as a no. He sets the mugs down on the counter and pretends to watch the coffee brewing in the electric coffee maker by the stove. His eyes linger on Marcus, who is running his fingers along the back of one of the dining room chairs, his eyes downcast and his shoulders stooped. He has been here for ten minutes and already everything in Tomas’ house knows his hands. He has opened every door and feasted his eyes on every room.

“Where are you from?” Tomas asks cautiously.

Marcus glances up. “My accent caught you off guard, did it?”

“I’ll admit it did.”

“I’m from Texas.”

“No,” Tomas says, “where in _England.”_

“Texas,” Marcus says with a crooked smile. “I moved, or uh, was moved to England when I was seven. Leicestershire. I grew up there before I came back to the states.”

“The same thing happened to me,” Tomas says, more delighted than he has any reason to be. “Chicago, Mexico, then Chicago again. And now here.”

“You’re taking the piss!”

“No,” Tomas laughs, switching off the coffee maker. “I’m not.”

He pours them two mugs of coffee and serves it black. Without the sugar it tastes like the run-off of a dirty river, but Tomas isn’t about to put sugar in his cup if Marcus doesn’t put it in his, so they end up leaning on the island counter in the center of the kitchen, one on either side, watching each other pretend to drink.

Bitter coffee is the last thing Tomas is thinking about.

He worries his chipped mug between his hands for a moment, enjoying the heat of the porcelain on his palms. Then he leans forward, lowers his voice as though to keep his words private, and whispers, “Tell me everything.”

And Marcus does.

Tomas listens with rapt attention as Marcus outpours stories like a bursting dam. He tells him about the dead-wakers down in Arizona, who coerced demons into the skeletons of desert jackals and made them lie in wait by the road to hijack cars. He tells him about the possessed twins in Little Rock; how only one of them held a demon within her, and the other manifested the symptoms to match. Only by the grace of God could Marcus tell which was which. Tomas listens to these stories and many more, asking questions where appropriate, and his face must show horror and wonder in all the right places because before long Marcus is _grinning_ when he tells some of these stories, ducking his head like a flattered schoolboy. Tomas is enraptured by it, and though their coffee has long gone cold, he doesn’t want to relinquish his cup. The sun goes down outside, and they’re still talking.

_I believe him._

It’s an incredible thought, at once an unimaginable weight and the lightening of a heavy burden. Every word this man says rings true in his heart. _True as the word of God, darling._ Marcus Keane is an exorcist. An exorcist touched by God.

Tomas’ first thought is _show me how,_ but he doesn’t voice it. This man makes him feel small. No, not small, small is not the right word. He makes him feel . . . unfinished. Untested. Untried.

 _Try me,_ Tomas thinks desperately. _Give me an occasion, and I’ll step up to it._

“Hey,” says Marcus, tilting his head a little. He smiles in a friendly, coaxing way. “Talk to me.”

“Sorry,” Tomas grimaces, setting the mug down to rub the bridge of his nose with his hand. “I have not found it easy to think clearly these past few days.”

In truth, this conversation with Marcus has been the easiest, laziest back-and-forth he’s ever had, like men who have known each other for years. The old house, so often stifling, now feels as though every window has been opened, and the elements are free to rush through the hallways as they please. Marcus Keane, elemental.

“Tell me about your dreams,” Marcus says, with his now-familiar intensity. He reminds Tomas of the older boys at seminary, the ones who walked in the footsteps of the Lord but no longer held the fear of the professors or Mother Superior.

Tomas leans against the counter with a heavy sigh. He can hear a clock ticking quietly and consistently in the dim light of the kitchen. He wasn’t aware that the kitchen had a clock.

“The first two,” he says slowly, “were similar to one another. I saw . . . well, I saw the Devil, coming from the West.”

Marcus nods slowly. “How did you feel when you saw him?”

“I felt . . .”

Frightened? It was the Devil, after all. But no, not frightened.

Tomas swallows grimly. “I felt . . . protected. And detached, as though I were told to observe something that had nothing and everything to do with me. Like a man who locks himself in a cage to play with sharks.”

 _Like someone was holding my hand,_ he thinks, but does not say, _and pointing with the other, saying, look but don’t touch, that creature is poisonous._

“I see,” says Marcus. “And the second one felt the same?”

“Just the same.”

“And the third?”

“The third was different,” says Tomas. _Different_ is such an understatement he could almost laugh. He tells Marcus every detail of that cold and wretched place, and of the terrible weight on his chest and throat when he’d woken up. Marcus’ face twitches once or twice while he speaks, but otherwise he remains very still, his hands white-knuckled around his mug.

He sets it down too firmly when Tomas finishes talking. It hits the counter with a loud _clink._

“Thank you for telling me,” he says. He doesn’t say anything more.

Tomas licks his suddenly dry lips and leans his elbows on the countertop, arms folded. Marcus mimics him almost unconsciously, the leather of his jacket squeaking as it rubs against himself.

“I have been following the Devil for eighteen months now,” Marcus says quietly, “cleaning up his messes. Usually if he stops moving, it’s for a reason, and if he stops in a one-preacher town like this one, it’s usually the preacher who gets hit the hardest. The preacher, and the children.”

Tomas swallows grimly, and nods.

“You said there was something sleeping under the town?”

“I can _feel_ it,” says Tomas. “In my dreams.”

Marcus looks very, very tired. He doesn’t look at Tomas when he says, “We should lie low for the night. If my suspicions are correct, I’ll know what we have to do in the morning.”

The word _we_ jump-starts Tomas’ heart to a mile a minute. “We?” he says, his voice carefully calm.

Marcus’ gaze flickers up at his face and away again. “I meant _I,”_ he says firmly.

“You don’t have to,” Tomas says, and Marcus gives him a strange look. Tomas realizes he must’ve sounded desperate, and closes his eyes in mortification. “Let me do this with you,” he clarifies. “Whatever this is, I want to do it with you.”

“Oh, you want to be a hero, do you?” Marcus says bitterly.

“Yeah,” says Tomas. “I do. And I can do it. Please, just, give me a chance.”

Marcus gives him a long, calculating look. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stands up, stretching his arms over his head with an exhausted groan.

“As long as I’m not responsible for you,” he says, and Tomas’ heart soars.

 

The attic is different at night.

There’s an airy peacefulness to it that the rest of the house doesn’t have. Downstairs it feels hot and cloistered; Tomas feels unwashed there, even after a shower. Like he’s stepped in something he can’t scrape off. Here the air is dusty, but clean. The moon casts its pearly glow across the painted floorboards. The white curtains move gently with the breeze.

Tomas, who is sitting on the edge of the cot with his shoes off and his shirt only half undone, can’t help but stop to enjoy it. He closes his eyes, enjoying the play of the cool evening breeze across his skin. When Marcus leaves town, he thinks, he could see himself sleeping up here permanently. He wonders if he could get a proper bed frame up the stairs.

He finishes changing and stands up to open the window a little more. He can see the long, stretching shadows of the trees in the moonlight. The cornstalks beyond the fence ripple like water, glinting with the dim glow of nighttime fireflies. It’s silent outside but for the rustling of the corn, and . . .

Tomas frowns, holds his breath for a moment to try to hear better. He can hear it only faintly- a low, rhythmic sound, like a creaking step, or a chirping cricket.

Tomas is alarmed by this, just for a moment, until he realizes that what he’s hearing is the creaking of the rocking chair on the porch. He opens the window a little further, just enough for him to look straight down, and catches a glimpse of Marcus, sitting on the porch.

His body is still, and quiet. Tomas has known him for less than a day, but in all that time he had not stopped moving, fidgeting, touching. But now he is still.

It feels like something Tomas isn’t supposed to see. He ducks back inside and shuts the window carefully and quietly, his heart going a mile a minute. Marcus had looked like a watchdog, down there. What was he watching? Tomas had the terrible, dizzying thought that if he looked down there again, Marcus would be looking straight up at him, his eyes gleaming like the teeth of an animal.

 

_This is a good dream._

_Tomas can feel the truth of that in his blood, in the vibrations of his very skin. He feels calm, and clarity. Do not be afraid._

_It’s nighttime, now. The stars are arrayed in the heavens before him as he walks through the blue-purple gloom of midnight. He cannot see where he’s going- everywhere he looks, there is corn- but he’s equally certain that he does not need to see. He is being guided, a gentle tug at his hand, his feet, his heart._

_When he finds it, he knows it immediately for what it is. A crack in the earth. A long, deep tear, as though some great and terrible thing had forced their hands into the dirt and torn it apart._

_Tomas kneels beside it, feeling incredibly sad._

_He reaches out to touch it, and the earth flinches._

_The knowledge of this thing runs through him like a vein of gold. Something is sleeping under Snakespring, USA. Something old. Something big. Down, down, down under the earth, under the dust and the dirt and the chalk. Down where the dead bones lie and the blind fish swim._

_And now it is waking up._

_Too soon._

_Too soon._

_Too soon._

 

There’s a knock at the door.

Marcus has raided the kitchen for some breakfast, and riled up some eggs and sausages Tomas had stashed in the fridge. They’re now sizzling together on the same pan, the grease popping and sputtering, the sausages lending their flavor nicely to the eggs. Marcus is leaning on the counter, poking them with a spatula as they cook, and Tomas, who is making another piss-poor pot of coffee in the electric coffee maker, is taken so off-guard by the knock that he almost cracks his head against one of the cabinets over his head.

The knocking begins again, this time in earnest.

“You get many visitors all the way out here?” Marcus asks through a yawn. He looks terrible, and the shadows under his eyes are even darker. Nor has he shaved. He looks, to Tomas’ eye, like exactly the kind of man he wouldn’t like to be seen making breakfast with.

“No,” says Tomas honestly, wiping off his hands on a rag towel as he goes to answer the door. “But I have not been here long.”

He discards the towel on the kitchen table and opens the door wide. The sunrise is on the other side of the house, throwing the yard into bold stripes of sunshine yellow and honeybee black. The man waiting for him on the doorstep is slim and handsome in his scuffed boots and red flannel, and his arms are folded as he ever-so-slightly cranes his neck to catch a glimpse into the house. Tomas doesn’t recognize him for a moment, until a tiny, pale face peeks out from behind his legs and looks at him.

Grace’s eyes are wide and curious. She looks at Tomas like he’s an ugly, many-legged thing she has found beneath a rock.

“Mr. Kim,” Tomas says, remembering his name all at once. He looks back up at him and smiles. “What a surprise.”

“Hi,” he says. “Andrew is fine. Or Andy.”

Grace reaches up to grab his hand and starts swinging his arm back and forth. Andy indulges her while he reaches out to lean on the doorframe.

‘This place could use some work,” he says. “The weather hasn’t been kind to your paint job. The fence, too,” and here he jerks his head at the rickety fence that fringes the property. “It’s falling apart. The posts need re-spacing, and a new coat of paint.”

“Well,” says Tomas, nonplussed. “I only just moved in. I haven’t had time to fix things up.”

“I could do it for you, no trouble,” says Andy. “I’m a pretty good painter.”

Grace is still hanging on his arm, watching Tomas. Marcus, who is busy plating the eggs and sausages, catches sight of her, and when he does his whole face lights up. He gives her a friendly wave.

Her eyes widen even further. She tugs hard on Andy’s arm and he gives Tomas an almost apologetic look as he stoops, letting her cup her hand around her mouth and whisper to him.

Something changes in his face.

He stands up, glances over Tomas’ shoulder at Marcus. “Who’s that guy?” he says, his voice too casual for the look in his eyes. “Is he new in town?”

“Yes,” Tomas stammers, glancing over his shoulder and back again. “Yes, he is a priest as well and he has nowhere to go, so he is staying here. My door is always open to those who . . . I’m sorry, why exactly have you come here?”

“Just checking up on things. I was sent to make sure you didn’t need anything done,” he says. “With the house, y’know.”

He gestures vaguely at the porch.

“. . . Thank you, but not today. Who sent you?” Tomas asks cautiously.

Andy hesitates for a fraction of a second too long before he says “Dr. Bennett,” and Tomas starts to feel uncomfortable.

He glances over his shoulder at Marcus, who seems to have forgotten about the food entirely. He’s watching Andy’s face with a look of terrible concern, before looking at Tomas and narrowing his eyes, as though trying to tell him something.

“Daddy,” says Grace. “I wanna go. _I wanna go.”_

Tomas had not noticed the wind until now. It’s blowing from the West.

It’s cold.

Andy opens his mouth, and closes it again. Then he laughs, so abruptly that Tomas almost takes a step back in alarm. “If you need anything,” he says, “anything at all, you just-”

 _“Daddy,”_ says Grace. She looks angry now. Her little fist is balled up angrily in them hem of her gingham skirt. “I want to _go.”_

“Okay sweetheart,” Andy says hurriedly. He reaches down to card his hand through her hair briefly, then begins leading her off the porch. Grace shoots a look over her shoulder at Tomas, who is still standing in the doorway, and beyond him, at Marcus. She doesn’t smile. Her fist clenches tighter on Andy’s hand, and Tomas feels something similar clench in his belly, painful enough to make him wince.

He doesn’t close the door until he sees Andy help Grace up into the backseat of his truck, closing the door behind her before walking around to the driver’s side. He gives Tomas a little wave, almost a salute, as he slides in behind the wheel and turns the key in the ignition. His tires kick up clouds of dirt as he drives away.

Tomas shuts the door, turns around, and explodes into conversation almost at the same time that Marcus does.

“The wind, did you feel-”

“Is he always like that?”

“I don’t know, I met him once!”

“Did you see the little girl?”

“Her eyes, the way they-”

“I know!”

“Fuck, oh . . .” Tomas stammers, pressing the heel of his palm to his forehead, and his other hand to his belly, where the pain had come and went in the space of a few popping synapses. “I am not mad, then, I am not insane . . .”

“No,” says Marcus urgently, “far from it.”

He crosses the kitchen in three long strides and opens the door, peering out into the still-dissipating dust clouds. “There’s a demon’s influence there. Something evil has touched that family.”

“Maybe we’re exaggerating this thing,” Tomas says desperately. “Blowing it all out of proportion . . .”

“His _eyes,_ Tomas. The way he stood, the movement of his body. I know the signs. Something is hanging over that man and his daughter like a curse.”

Marcus is still standing silhouetted in the doorway, in a state of nervous agitation. “Are there any other children in your parish?”

“Plenty,” Tomas says, sitting down heavily at the kitchen table and rubbing his forehead. “I mean . . . _Dios mío_ . . . Mrs. Rance has girls, two of them. One of them was in church this morning, though I did not speak to her. And Mrs. Graham,” he says abruptly, snapping his fingers. “She has a daughter who has been ill, and refusing to see anyone.”

Marcus looks at him sharply. “Ill with what?”

“She told me it was a disease of the blood.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a doctor!” Tomas snaps, his heart going a mile a minute. The frustration passes moments after, and he groans and rubs his forehead with his knuckles. “I’m sorry, I should not have snapped.”

Marcus lets out a shaky exhale. He comes to sit next to him at the kitchen table, the chair legs shrieking across the floor as he pulls the chair out. He reaches out to lightly touch Tomas’ arm. “So you’re not a doctor,” he says gently. “Do you know anyone in town who is?”

“Only Dr. Bennett. He met me at the station.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

 _The biggest house in town,_ thinks Tomas. _Other than the Walters’ Estate._

“Yeah,” he says. “I can find it.”

“What about Mrs. Graham, what about her?”

“Tara told me she lives somewhere on the corner of Haymaker and Pitch, but I don’t . . . I do not know where that is.

“Alright,” says Marcus. “Listen. You wanted to help me.”

“I did. I do.”

“I need you to go talk to Dr. Bennett, ask him if he knows anything about the Graham girl, and if he really sent Andy by your house today.”

“Alright,” says Tomas shakily, his hand over his mouth. “And you?”

“I’m going to talk to Mrs. Graham, try to see her daughter if I can. I need to know if it’s all the families in town, or just the one.”

 _Let me go with you,_ Tomas wants to say. There are many things he wants to say, but at this moment, it would do no good to say any of them.

“Alright,” he says. Then, instinctively, “Stay safe.”

Marcus stares at him.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “I will.”

They stand up simultaneously, their chairs shrieking back against the linoleum, and as one, they leave the house.


	4. Chapter 4

Tomas will fucking kill himself one of these days.

Marcus can see it in the way he stands. The slope of his hips as he leans against the table, the set of his all-American shoulders. He’s got eyes like the last drops of honey at the bottom of the jar, and he looks at Marcus like it would never even occur to him to be afraid. His shoes have barely known country roads, and here he is thinking he’s ready to be the preacher of a town like Snakespring.

Marcus knows what they do here, every third Sunday. He can imagine it now; the prayers, the homilies. Tomas cracking open The Box and slipping his hand inside, face pleasantly placid, fearless as anything. He would pick the biggest snake in the knot- of course he would- and hold it up to the congregation. And all God’s people say, _“Amen.”_

That was the kind of man Father Tomas was, through and through. A pick-up-snakes kind of man. Not out of faith, no. Marcus had faith like a mountain, but he’d been bit by too many snakes to trust their coils. Tomas would do it out of sheer, foolhardy fearlessness. He hadn’t asked why Marcus had stayed up till dawn the night before, sitting on the porch, waiting for the Devil to sniff around for the scent of Tomas’ dreams. If he had, Marcus would’ve told him the truth. Tomas would’ve laughed, would’ve said, _“I’ll stay up tonight, then,”_ as if that didn’t defeat the purpose.

Tomas knew everyone in town already. He knew that Mrs. Graham lived on Haymaker and Pitch, which, at the moment, is proving a right bugger to find. Marcus leans against the wall of the old soda shop on Main Street, looking at the morning sun without seeing it, and thinking about Tomas, the Devil, and where the _fuck_ Haymaker and Pitch might be.

Not that he could just ask someone. He hadn’t met many folks in Snakespring, but he had a sneaking suspicion that they didn’t take kindly to strangers. Small town folk rarely do.

Marcus sets off down the street, hands shoved into his pockets, anxiously chewing on his lip as he slouches his way towards downtown. For all the talk of idle hands being the Devil’s playground, the Devil was not much of a time-waster. He was capricious, to be sure, but he was also busy, busy, busy. Marcus knew him well, and he knew what he liked.

No one in town is safe. Not while the sour-sweet wind still blows from the West.

Marcus looks up and down every street he comes across. Potter’s Field. Penderghast. Dead Dog. Hellfire. The Run. He walks in circles for several blocks before he angrily storms back to Main Street, and it’s then that he catches a glimpse of an oasis in the desert that floods his heart with relief.

_The Snakespring Public Library._

When he had been young, littler than little, the sight of a library had been an immediate balm to his soul. It was the same even today; there was a quality of safety to them. A place where a child could be a child, dropped off for free and allowed to be raised by books, if they only kept their voices down. Grace Kim had probably spent innumerable afternoons there. Every child in town must have.

More importantly, they would have maps.

 _What are you even doing,_ Marcus thinks. He’s immediately angry at himself for letting his thoughts betray him. _This is a wild goose chase._

But fuck if he doesn’t feel impotent, and fuck if he doesn’t want Tomas to think he knows what he’s doing.

He rests his hand agains the smooth glass door of the library, and pushes it open.

 

The moment Marcus sets foot on the faded vintage carpeting of the library, he’s hit with a wave of nostalgia so intense and so immediate that he almost forgets to breathe.

He remembers what it was to open the door and breathe the dusty, book-scented air. Freedom. Freedom from pain, from the constraint of time, from school, from Dad. The Snakespring Public Library smells like every other library in the world.

Marcus remembers the libraries of his distant youth being warm and dark and dusty, and so is this one; the whorled-glass windows turn the morning sunlight outside into the pleasant, pumpkin-orange glow of an early evening. It’s much more extensive than it had appeared from the outside, with a number of smaller rooms branching off from the main one, in which Marcus has tracked a few dusty bootprints. The walls are lined with books, and in some of the other rooms Marcus can catch glimpses of rows and rows of wood-and-metal shelves. There’s a staircase in one corner, going up and over into what Marcus can only assume is the restricted section.

The check-out desk is at the other end of the room, just across from the door. Marcus approaches it and rings the little bell with a flourish.

The woman sitting at the desk has red lips and nails to match, and she doesn't look up from her book. She’s got her feet up on the desk, and her mouth moves a little as she reads. The fishnet stockings on her legs look like spiderwebs in the dim light.

“Hullo,” says Marcus, not eager to be ignored. “I’m looking for a map of the town.”

“Sure, yeah,” she says, not looking up from her book. She’s worrying a strand of her hair with one hand; cornsilk blond, and tied neatly behind her neck with a thick black ribbon. It makes her look younger than she is, though Marcus reckons he has a good ten years on her, easy.

“Today, please,” he says, louder this time.

“Hang on,” she says. “A map of the town? This town’s the size of a-”

She glances up at him, and her face changes. She slams her book shut.

“Hello,” she says, with an interested smile. “I’m sorry, you’re, uh, new in town?”

“Yeah,” says Marcus. “New in town, that’s me.”

She gives him a once-over with her eyes, and smiles wider. “I’m Cherry,” she says, holding out her hand. “I’m the librarian here. One of ‘em, at any rate. You’re a priest?”

Marcus shakes her hand, and looks down at the book she’d been reading. _Cocktails and Cryptozoology: Unusual Spirits from Around the World._

“An exorcist, actually,” he says, arching an eyebrow at her.

Cherry’s eyes gleam with interest. “An exorcist?”

“That’s right.”

She grins, then stands up and cranes her neck, yelling at the stairs. _“Hey, Les!”_

Marcus hears a quiet scuffling, like a cat trapped in a closet. Then a very distant, _“Yeah?”_

_“There’s a guy here about the thing sleepin’ under the town!”_

“You know about that?” Marcus hisses, planting his palms flat on her desk. He glances over his shoulder out of habit, makes sure no one has followed him in.

“The signs all add up,” Cherry says, leaning forward just as eagerly. “The old preacher? He was bit by a snake. That doesn’t happen in Snakespring, not ever. Not since the days of old Hephaestus Shaw. _Les!”_

Les, as it turns out, is a short, tense ball of enthusiasm with rose-tinted sunglasses and an appalling orange and yellow shirt half tucked into the band of his corduroy pants. On his way down the stairs, books under his arm, he catches sight of Marcus for the first time and his mouth drops open.

“Hey there, fella,” he says, exchanging looks with Cherry. “You’re new in town?”

“That’s right,” says Marcus, who’s beginning to wonder if he’s a little out of his depth.

“He’s an exorcist,” Cherry clarifies, which makes Les nearly drop the books he’s holding.

“Lester,” he says eagerly, holding out his hand. “I’m Cherry’s husband. The _other_ librarian.”

“Cheers,” says Marcus, shaking it. “Father Marcus Keane.”

“Not _the_ Father Marcus Keane? The one who’s been castin’ out demons from here to Arizona?”

“I take it you’ve heard of me.”

“Cherry has been writing about you for _The Mason-Dixon Freakshow,”_ Les says sardonically. Cherry leans back in her chair and squints at Les with one eye, but he continues. “She’s more, uh, religiously-minded than I am. I’m more interested in the veil itself than what lies beyond it.”

“Why don’t you have a cult, Father?” says Cherry abruptly. “You look like one of those hallelujah, lay-on-hands, Kool-aid types. The preacher of this town picks up a knot of snakes every third Sunday and claims that God protects him; you should settle down, start walkin’ on water or swallowin’ swords or somethin’.”

“It’s not about me, or what I want,” Marcus says honestly. “It’s about my Lord God.”

“I like that,” Cherry says. She plants both her elbows on the desk and smiles at him, her red lips curling. “I like that a lot.”

“Hope it doesn’t make you a stuffed shirt,” Les sniffs.

“No, it doesn’t,” Marcus says with a crooked smile. “I know how to have fun.”

Les and Cherry exchange looks, and Marcus feels something nervous and excited swoop in his stomach. “I need a map of Snakespring,” he says, unable to contain his grin.

“That’s _right,”_ Cherry mutters, ducking under the desk. “You’re here about the thing sleepin’ under the town.”

“In a manner of speaking, yeah. What do you know about it?”

“Only what we know from books, and our own goddamned intuition. Pardon my French,” says Les apologetically. “I think it’s uh, less of a thing than a feelin’. Like some sort of _evil_ , if you want to call it that, is rising up under the town. Like a fissure, or a crack in the earth.”

“I see,” says Marcus, his mind working furiously. _A crack. A fissure._

“You see it all the time, throughout history. These 'waves of evil' that build and build to a kind of . . . orgasmic cataclysm of disaster. And they’re always centered around a person, a place, a time. Cherry, here,” says Les drily, adjusting his glasses, “thinks it more likely that it’s some kind of . . . _fairy.”_

“A _child of the Devil,”_ Cherry clarifies testily, popping her head back up from behind the desk. “A fiend, or a demigod of some kind. Not a fuckin’ _fairy,_ Les.”

She slaps a neatly folded parcel of papers onto the desktop, and Marcus takes them without preamble and starts rifling through them. It’s vague at best, a reprint of a reprint of a reprint, all faded blue and red ink and large swaths of the map stippled with little gray dots that must signify farmland. At Marcus’ request, Cherry leaves a library stamp over the little yellow square of the library building- it’s a tiny snake, complete with glasses and graduation cap- and Marcus follows the gray lines of the roads back the way he came, all the way to the old preacher’s house. Tomas’ house, now. Out there in the corn, a long way from anyone and anything. Isolated.

“Thank you,” he says, hurriedly crumpling up the map and shoving it into his coat pocket. It sticks out halfway, like the ragged tail of a kite. “Gotta dash, but, you’ve been lovely, really you have.”

“You’re not so good with people, are you,” says Cherry, one eyebrow raised.

“I’ll be back,” he throws over his shoulder, already halfway out the door. “I mean that.”

“Come back anytime, asshole,” says Les, but Marcus can hear the smile in his voice when he says it.

 

The house on Haymaker and Pitch is a tall, narrow house crammed between two others. The paint is the color of dried blood, and it’s peeling off in flakes; there are lace curtains in the windows, and a painted cross hung neatly by the doorbell. Marcus knocks on the door instead of ringing, and receives no reply.

He takes a few steps back, cranes his neck to look for movement in the upstairs windows. The curtains hang still and unmoving. The lights are out, but there’s a car out front that he suspects belongs to Mrs Graham.

He knocks again. Still nothing.

Marcus, who has yet to encounter a house he couldn’t get in to, starts walking around back. There are two narrow openings on either side of the house, providing access to the backyard; the one on the left would require Marcus, thin though he is, to walk sideways, so he takes the rightmost one, and picks his way through the dying vegetation towards the backyard.

It’s open there, and grassy, with a tall fence and a dead flowerbed. There’s a door back here too, though Marcus doesn’t knock on it. He steps back, and scans the windows. No movement. No light.

Marcus swallows grimly, and takes a moment to wonder if it’s really worth it, when he’s not even sure if the Devil has come by this house at all. His doubts leave him as quickly as they come- he knows the Devil well, he knows the consequences of being less than thorough- and he starts digging through his coat pockets for his lock picks.

Marcus finally finds them, but before he can bring them out, he hears a loud _thump._ He looks up sharply, and there’s a little girl in the upstairs window, looking down at him.

She’s got red hair, and pale, moon-like face. She thumps on the window once, twice, her eyes wide, her mouth moving. Marcus can see her distress, can almost hear her voice, but it’s too muffled by the windowpane. Then he sees her breathe on the glass, and begin to trace letters in the mist.

 **_PLEH_ **  
**_EM_ **

Marcus’ stomach drops into his shoes.

He runs closer to the house and slams his fist against the wall. He looks around in the dirt, scrabbling for a rock, and finally finds one, which he hucks up at the window. It tinkles against the glass but thankfully doesn’t break it, and he sees the little girl almost sob with relief. A rock, a sign, a gesture. _You’re not alone. Someone’s seen you._

Marcus pounds on the back door, runs around to the front to try the front door again. Nothing. He’s just about to pull out his lock picks again, breaking and entering be damned, when he hears the scraping and clicking of locks being turned. The door swings open, just a crack, and another pale, moon-like face peers out at him.

“Who are you?” she whispers. “What are you doing?”

“Are you Mrs. Graham?” Marcus asks, struggling to keep his voice steady.

“I am, sir, and this is private property.”

 _“Fuck that,”_ says Marcus, taking a step closer, and Mrs. Graham seems to shrink back into herself, her eyes darting wildly, her hand firmly clamped on the door frame.

“Sir,” she says, her voice trembling and weak. “If you don’t leave right, right now, I, I, I’ll call Sheriff Morrow on you.”

Dimly, Marcus is aware of the sound of a slamming car door on the street behind him. He ignores it, too distracted by the crucifix around Mrs. Graham’s neck. It gleams brightly in the early morning sun.

“I’ll do it!” says Mrs. Graham, her voice rising. “I really will!”

“Mrs. Graham,” says Marcus, raising his hands in what he hopes is a placating gesture. “My . . . my name is Father Marcus Keane. I’m a priest.”

Her breath catches in her throat, and she stares at him, eyes as round as saucers. “Father Marcus,” she whispers. _“The_ Father Marcus?”

“Is everything alright here?” says a voice just behind Marcus’ ear.

Marcus almost leaps out of his skin. “Fucking hell, mate,” he stammers, stumbling away from the man who’s come up behind him. He’s tall, solidly built, with eyes that look at Marcus and Mrs. Graham with equal suspicion. Marcus’ heart sinks when he realizes the man is in uniform. Sheriff Morrow.

“Where the _fuck_ did you come from,” says Marcus weakly, looking up and down the street.

“I knew it!” Mrs. Graham says shrilly, throwing the door wide open. “You’ve been watching my house!”

“Ah, no, ma’am,” says Morrow, ducking his head apologetically. He doesn’t look away from her. “This is my usual route, and-”

“You have! You’ve been-” her voice seems to get caught in her throat, and she struggles for a moment. Finally she manages to say, in a strangled whispers, “Just . . . get his man away from my house. Please.”

“Sir,” Morrow says kindly, placing his hand firmly on Marcus’ shoulder, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You’re scaring the lady.”

“Don’t be _polite,”_ Mrs Graham exclaims. “Arrest him! Are you the sheriff or aren’t you?”

Marcus looks Morrow full in the face, hopes the look in his eyes will be enough to convince him otherwise. “You can’t tell me you don’t know something’s wrong in that house.”

Morrow doesn’t break his gaze, but nor does he speak to Marcus when he says, “I can take him in, but only till tomorrow, Mrs. Graham. For your sake, I’ll do that.”

“Good,” she says shakily. “He’s probably drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“He’s a priest, ma’am.”

“I don’t care!” she insists, her voice rising still louder. “I don’t _care!_ Just don’t let him near my Harper. She’s not ready for him yet, her health . . . her disease of the blood . . . she’s not _ready_ . . .”

“Sir,” Morrows says, giving Mrs. Graham a cold look out of the corner of his eye. “Please step this way.”

And Marcus, bitter and seething, does.

 

Marcus lays flat on his back, his arms behind his head, and tries to ignore the ache of his bones against the cold metal bench that constitutes the only furniture in his holding cell. He’s paced the few square feet of space he has until his boots wore through the floor, so to speak, and now there’s nothing for it but to lie here, staring at the ugly mustard-yellow walls and sweating through his shirt. It’s swelteringly hot in this place, and the lights, too harsh and too clinical, make Marcus’ skin look sallow and gray. It’s not the first holding cell he’s languished in, but it’s by far the least pleasant.

Or it would be, if he didn’t have a means of keeping entertained.

Marcus sighs and looks over to the left, out through the bars at where Sheriff Morrow has been sitting at his desk, noisily flipping through his papers and giving the staticky old TV box a good thump every time the picture threatens to give way to static. Not many personal effects on the desk; a shoebox full of letters, shoved under some notebooks. A calendar of North American wildlife. A dog-eared _Fish & Game_ sticking out of the dustbin. The man looks like he lives here, and Marcus feels a stab of sympathy for him. He wouldn’t wish this place on anyone, no matter which side of the bars they were on.

“You gonna keep me here all night?” he asks.

Morrow glances up at him, smiles faintly and looks back down. He’s scribbling something on a clipboard as Marcus watches him. “Yup, ‘fraid so. Mrs. Graham will have my hide if I don’t and between you and me, she’s been looking for a reason to skin me alive.”

He looks up again, his expression more serious this time. “I don’t blame you, though. For making a fuss outside her door.”

“Oh?”

“Mr. Graham passed away some time ago. Fell down the stairs. The girl, Harper, was taken out of school not long after.”

“My God,” Marcus murmurs.

“Not a damn thing I can do about it, no matter how long I spend parked outside her door,” Morrow says, his voice bitter. He’s not looking at Marcus as he says it, his attention firmly fixed on the clipboard. “These things _do not happen_ in Snakespring. That’s how Maria Walters likes it.”

They spend the next few minutes in silence, Marcus staring at the ceiling, Morrow scribbling angrily until he finally sighs and puts down his pen, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the back of his thumb. He looks like a man who does not get angry often, and is not accustomed to dealing with it. Marcus wonders what that’s like.

“We don’t get a lot of new faces in town,” Morrow says finally. He drops his clipboard on the desk and picks up a thin sheaf of papers, gesturing vaguely at Marcus with them. _“Mister_ Marcus Keane?”

“That’s me.”

“Impersonating a priest,” says Morrow with mock distaste, and Marcus sees his eyes glitter with amusement. “Now, I may not be a religious man, but that sounds like a sin, Father.”

Marcus laughs, and feels a warm thrill of delight when Morrow laughs too. He pushes himself into a sitting position and leans his back against the cold cell wall. “I used to be a priest,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“Oh? Lapsed Catholic?”

“Not by choice.”

“I see,” says Morrow, frowning. He opens one of his desk drawers with a metallic rattling sound, and dips his hand into it. “The Bible I took off you is full of some fucked up shit, if you don’t mind my saying.”

He holds up Marcus’ Bible, and Marcus thinks of all the other things were probably in that drawer with it. His crucifix. His cigarettes. The knife he keeps strapped to his leg, the one with Proverbs 23:2 etched into the metal in Latin. Morrow goes to open the book, and Marcus’ hand jumps up, his body tensing almost involuntarily. “Please,” he says, “don’t.”

Morrow hesitates.

He has no reason to stop, or to put it down, but he does so anyway. He rests the Bible carefully on the desktop and Marcus feels a warm rush of gratitude.

“What’s your name?” he asks, letting himself relax.

“Peter,” says Peter.

“Can I have my smokes back, Peter?”

“Not by a long shot, son. These will kill you.”

“Son?” Marcus laughs. “I’m older than _you.”_

Peter has a big, warm laugh. An everything-is-alright kind of laugh. He leans his elbows on the desk and looks at Marcus like he’s the best thing since Christmas dinner, and Marcus, struggling to find something to say to keep the conversation going, nods at the shoebox full of letters. “I, uh,” he says. “I’m not the best with boundaries-”

“I found you outside a woman’s house.”

“-but I couldn’t help noticing that those are addressed to a Peter Osbourne,” Marcus finishes. “I thought your name was Morrow.”

Peter goes a little red in the face, and coughs into his hand. “Uh, yeah,” he says, folding his arms again. He gives Marcus a cool, distant look. “Osbourne was my husband’s name, before he passed away. Can’t very well go by it here, not in a town like this.”

“Oh.”

The revelation brings with it a confusing tangle of emotions, impossible to parse or understand. Marcus just sits there, dumbstruck, his voice caught in his throat.

“Is that a problem for you?” Peter says quietly. He doesn’t look away, or try to break eye contact. He’s not like Marcus.

“No,” says Marcus, with great sincerity. “No, it’s . . . it’s far from a problem.”

A long time ago, when it had been more common for him to fantasize about such things, he would’ve liked to take a man’s name as his own. Sometimes he liked to imagine that, if a priest is married to God and God is the spiritual Father, then being known as _Father Marcus_ was almost enough.

The Church had taken that from him too. Like a bitter divorcee with an engagement ring, Marcus kept the collar.

Peter smiles, and ducks his head awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. They sit in silence for a while, Marcus on his back with his legs hanging off the bench, and Peter flipping through the papers on his desk, occasionally correcting something, or scribbling something in sweet-smelling black ink. Marcus steals glances at him occasionally, then quickly looks back at the ceiling. He wonders if Peter is looking too.

“You should try to get some sleep,” Peter says gently, after a while. “You’ll be here till tomorrow morning, I’m afraid, and frankly you look like you could do with a day’s rest.”

“I look that terrible, do I?”

“I’m sure you clean up well.”

Marcus laughs with a kind of nervous, shrill shyness that he immediately regrets. He wonders if Tomas would say the same, if he were here.

“. . . Do you need a pillow or something?” Peter asks awkwardly.

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve learned how to sleep anywhere.”

“I’m sorry,” says Peter, and Marcus doesn’t know why but the way Peter says it makes something twinge deep in his heart.

“S’alright,” he mutters, closing his eyes. “You know, you’re a very accommodating sheriff.”

“You’re a very well-behaved prisoner.”

“Just wait till you get to know me, luv.”

Marcus can feel Peter’s eyes on him, even with his own eyes closed.

He grins. For the first time in a long, long time, he feels safe.

 

Marcus stirs awake to the sound of chirping crickets.

Or it might be cicadas, he’s too exhausted to know or care. The cold metal of the bench is pressing sharply into his side, making his hip bone ache and his arm grow numb. He’s slept in worse places, but it rarely gets easier.

This is the first time Marcus has slept in days.

He sits up, rubs his eyes. The lights are out, and there are no windows in this place. He realizes he has no concept of night or day, no way of knowing how long he slept. There’s no clock in this room, probably for the best; Marcus isn’t eager to watch the seconds tick away, agonizingly slow as he sits and stares into the darkness. Last night had been sleepless, but easy. There had been fireflies, and a cool breeze, and Marcus had almost enjoyed himself as he stayed up all night on the porch.

Peter’s desk stands empty outside his cell. Marcus hopes he’s just gone home for the night. Home to his empty house.

Marcus is still staring at the desk when he realizes the crickets have stopped.

He frowns. Closes his eyes and tilts his head. There’s nothing. Not even a chirp.

Something tickles against his skin, and Marcus’ eyes snap open. He can smell it. The sour-sweet Western wind. Like apples in a dead orchard, fermenting into a pulp.

Marcus stays very still, as still as a scarecrow. His eyes flicker in every direction at once, looking, looking. _Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . ._

Then he hears it. A door squeaking open on metallic hinges, then slowly rasping closed.

Footsteps. Slow and even and heavy, thumping down the hall.

“Peter?” says Marcus, hoping against hope that Peter’s forgotten something, that he’s just coming back to get his coat.

The lights flicker once, twice, then snap on in a burst of popping, fizzing light. Marcus throws his arm over his eyes, disoriented and half-blind.

_“Less than a day in the coun'y lock-up and already friendly with the local sheriff? Fuck m’lad, if I’da hit you harder, maybe you wouldn’a turned queer.”_

Marcus blinks rapidly, trying to dispel the multicolored spots blurring his vision. The Devil is leaning on Peter’s desk, watching him through the bars. His arms are crossed, his legs are stretched out before him. He looks pleased to see him.

The Devil, as Marcus knows him, has big hands and the legs of a dancer. His face is far too much like Marcus’ own; it shares the same cunning mouth, and the eyes that crinkle at the corners when the he smiles. The face of his father, too perfect, right down to the clean-shaven cheeks, and the shaving mark on his jaw from where he cut himself the morning before he split his wife’s skull with a hammer.

The Devil’s voice, as Marcus knows it, is as familiar to him as his own reflection. It's his father’s voice, and, when it suits the Devil's interests, his father's accent. Dad had been from England before he came to the States; Marcus’ mother had hoped her baby would never see English soil. She had hoped for many things.

The Devil shows his teeth to Marcus in something like a smile. “There you are,” he says. “My favorite shadow.”

“What do you want,” says Marcus, hoping the Devil can’t see how his mouth has gone dry, and his hands have clamped down tight on the edge of the bench.

“I was worried about you,” says the Devil pleasantly. “I stopped by the preacher’s house again this evening and lo and behold, this time you weren’t there to turn me away. I could’ve walked on in and done whatever I pleased.”

Marcus slams his hands on the bars and white-knuckles them in his grip. He bares his teeth at the Devil and snarls, non-verbal. The Devil steals the words from his mouth so easily these days.

“Calm down,” says the Devil. “You’ll have a heart attack.”

He pushes off from the desk with a neat twitch of his hips and begins to pace. Even his footsteps are the same, as heavy and fatal as the footsteps outside Marcus’ childhood bedroom door.

“Why?” Marcus growls through the bars. The Devil is close, so close- he could reach out and touch him. “Why him? Just because he’s the preacher . . ?”

“He’s prophetic,” says the Devil. He turns on his heel, the rubber soles of his boots shrieking against the floor. “The Enemy is sending him visions. Of me, of you, of the baby I birthed into the earth beneath this town way back before Hephaestus Shaw even _thought_ about the New World. That kind of gift is reserved for saints, not the preacher of a one church town. I’ve been in that man’s mind, and he’s far from a saint.”

The Devil stops his pacing, stops directly in front of Marcus’ cell and tilts his head, as if inspecting him. Marcus can feel his heart pounding in his chest, his blood running hot and cold all at once. Marcus has run from the Devil before, even as he chases him across the country; this time, there is no where to run. The Devil knows it, and smiles.

“He was sleeping in the attic this time, you know,” he says. “I think he thought you were coming back late, and would want the bed.”

“What do you _want_ from me?”

“I want to make a deal with you, Marcus Keane.”

“Fuck, is that all?” Marcus laughs. “We’ve played this game before and I always win. I’m _bored_ of it now. If you think I’ll make a deal with you after what you’ve done to Grace Kim and Harper Graham, you can fuck off back to Hell with your tail between your legs.”

Two vicious eyes narrow into slits, and Marcus thinks, _I see you, you old snake._ The Devil's left hand reaches out, wraps around one of the bars as if testing their solidity. Marcus is powerfully reminded that iron is nothing to the Devil. Walls and cages and cities are less than nothing.

 _“I done nothing to the Graham girl or the fucked-out old sow she calls her mum,”_ says the Devil, his father’s accent thick as oil on his tongue. “And as for the Kim girl,” he continues, “all I did was give her her heart’s desire. I’m not here for the children. I’m not even here for the preacher.”

Marcus shakes his head, his heartbeat going a mile a minute. The Devil does that to him. The Devil makes that easy, easy anger rise up in him, and fuck if it isn’t sweet to feel anger singing in his blood. “No, I know,” he says slyly. “You’re here for the thing under the town.”

“Top marks,” says the Devil. “You'd've done your dad proud.”

Marcus has been following the Devil for eighteen months. He has learned his movements, and his mannerisms, at least as they appear in Marcus’ eyes. He knows the Devil is going to begin pacing again a fraction of a second before he does it, and sure enough, his father’s old workman’s boots scrape across the country lock-up’s floor, and the Devil begins to move.

“Long ago I birthed one of my children under the earth here,” says the Devil, his voice as quiet as the still-small voice of God, “and it has been sleeping ever since. Now it waking up far, far too early, and I am here to put it to sleep again until its proper time.”

Tomas had dreamt of it, had told Marcus as much. Marcus felt in his old bones that it was true. The thing under the town sent its creeping tendrils up, working its wicked ways in this town. It killed the old preacher, Marcus knew; he had died of the bite of a serpent. No preacher died of a serpent bite, not in this town- it was the blessing of Hephaestus Shaw, which had hung over Snakespring for many a year.

The Devil ceases his pacing and stands before Marcus’ cell, his hands in his pockets, his eyes half-closed as he looks at him.

 _“I will tell y’this once,”_ he says, a spark of irritation in his voice, _“an’ once only. I am tired of playing games for your rancid little soul. I know you’ll give it t’ me free of charge when the time comes. But for now, rest assured that if y’don’t stay out of m’way, I'll fuck_ _the preacher so full of nightmares that he’ll never sleep again for fear of ‘em.”_

Marcus, who feels all things deeply, sits down heavily on the bench in his cell and takes a deep, shuddering breath. He is beyond the fear of showing vulnerability to the Devil. They are too familiar with one another’s habits for something like that.

“You know what I think?”

“Always.”

“I think you’re scared of me.”

The Devil tilts his head, blinks slowly and lazily as he watches him.

“Scared enough to wait until I was behind bars to come and menace me properly,” Marcus sneers. “You dead-eyed, sallow pig of a fallen angel.”

“Good night, Marcus Keane.”

“You’re scared of me, and I _like it.”_

“I've got a long night ahead of me,” says the Devil, his upper lip curled off his teeth, just the way Dad’s had done, just the way Marcus’ still does. "I'll tell the new preacher you said hello."

Above them, the lightbulbs spit and sputter before snapping off, plunging the room into darkness and silence.

 

Marcus paces the length of his cage until dawn, muttering and hissing and bubbling over with apoplectic agitation. It’s only when Peter comes back, all broad shoulders and heavy footsteps, that Marcus realizes it’s morning.

“Buckle up, buttercup,” says Peter cheerily, snapping his key ring off his belt and starting to unlock Marcus’ cell. “Mom and Dad are here to pick you up.”

Marcus smiles ruefully when Peter says that, and hopes he didn’t see him flinch. Peter’s not alone. Behind him, standing awkwardly by the wall like two children abandoned at a party, are Father Tomas and an unfamiliar man with a cane and a sour expression. Tomas’ face is pale as a corpse, and his lips show signs of biting. His arms are folded in that particular way that Marcus knows is meant to stop his hands from shaking. He looks Marcus up and down, visibly relieved, and Marcus can see a little of the tension in his limbs start to relax.

A rush of sickening loathing for the Devil starts rising in Marcus’ gorge. He wants to vomit. He wants to _hurt_ something.

Instead he schools his face into a neutral expression, and gives Peter a warm, two-handed handshake as he leaves his cell.

“You stuff is on my desk,” Peter says warmly. He doesn’t let go of Marcus’ hand. “Everything but the smokes.”

“Fuck you,” says Marcus, which gets him a laugh. He leans a little closer and says, with great sincerity, “Thank you, Peter. For everything.”

Tomas, meanwhile, has gone even whiter. He stares at the ground, blinking slowly and saying nothing. “Marcus, this is Dr. Bennett,” he says finally. “Bennett, this is Father Marcus Keane.”

“Pleasure,” says Dr. Bennett, in a tone that suggests he read the word in a textbook.

“Thanks for picking me up,” says Marcus, but Tomas’ face doesn’t change, and the stiffness in his posture doesn’t subside.

Marcus isn’t good at this. Never has been. But _God_ he wants to do something to comfort him, something to let him know that he’s there and that this won’t happen again, so before Marcus knows what’s come over him he slips his arm roughly around Tomas’ neck and plants a too-firm kiss against his temple. He squeezes him tightly and says, “I don’t suppose you have any smokes? Peter took mine.”

Tomas shrugs out from under his arm. He looks, if possible, even tenser than before.

“No,” he says weakly. Then, “Come on. Dr. Bennett will drive us back to the house.”


	5. Chapter 5

There was no fanfare, no welcoming committee, when the Devil went down to Snakespring. He arrived quietly in the early hours of Thursday morning, and he walked right on down the center of town with nobody there to see him or say hello.

The Devil met only one other person on that first day. She was a little girl, name of Grace, who was frequently inclined to making trouble. She was sickly, and was no longer permitted to leave the house without a grown-up. Being a girl of stubborn mind and scabby knees, she was frequently to be seen scrumping apples from the dry old trees in the schoolyard, or tussling with other kids in the dust.

“What’s your name, darlin’?” said the Devil to the girl. He found her sitting on the front steps of the old soda shop, chewing on her hair and looking quite as bored as a little girl up before dawn could be.

“My name’s Grace,” she said.

“Tell me, Grace,” said the Devil, sitting next to her on the steps, “what’s your absolute favorite thing to do?”

“Play outside,” she said promptly.

“Well, there’s certainly a lot of outside to go around,” said the Devil, nodding as he surveyed the dusty street. “Not a lot of people out here, neither.”

“Never is, this early.”

“Why, I thought in small towns like this y’all got an early start.”

“Nah,” said Grace. “Nobody likes to do anything here.”

“That’s a shame,” said the Devil. “That is really and truly a shame.”

They sat together for a while, the Devil and Grace, just watching the dust twirl around their feet, like little storm clouds.

“Grace, darlin’,” said the Devil. “What do you want most in all the world?”

Grace frowned at her feet. The Devil cut in before she could speak. “An’ I don’t mean a pretty dress, nor a puppy of some sort neither. I mean, what do you _want._ Way down deep in the secret places of you.”

Grace’s frown turned into a full scowl. She kicked the ground with one booted heel. “I want Dad to pay attention to me,” she said. “Verity’s his favorite. Everyone’s his favorite but me.”

The Devil inhaled sharply through gritted teeth. “Ah, dads can be like that.”

“Yeah.”

“Always pickin’ favorites.”

“It’s just ‘cause they’re older than me,” Grace said, the words tumbling out of her all fast and breathless. “It’s just ‘cause they all need things, Caleb can’t see and Truck is dumb and they all need attention all the time. But there’s nothing wrong with _me.”_

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said the Devil, stretching out his legs in front of him. “I’ll tell you just what I’m gonna do, now. I want you to close your eyes. Close ‘em,” he said again, louder, and Grace closed her eyes. “Now, I’m gonna boop your nose, just . . . like . . .”

He booped her nose with his index finger. Grace giggled.

“Boop! Just like that,” said the Devil. “And now you’re gonna be your daddy’s favorite for ever and ever and ever, and he’s gonna give you all of his attention, all of the time, and nothing is ever, _ever,”_ he repeated, looking dead in Grace’s eyes when she opened them, “gonna change his mind. You hear me, now?”

“I hear you.”

“You’ll be his favorite, favorite, favorite, and he’s gonna do whatever you tell him to and then some. Got it?”

“Got it!” said Grace, her eyes wide and excited and already beginning to cloud over.

“Now,” said the Devil, “there’s just one catch. One sweet, itty-bitty little thing I’m gonna need you to do for me.”

“‘Kay,” said Grace, scooting closer.

“I didn’t come here alone, little darlin’. There’s a bad man followin’ me, a very bad man, and you’ll know him on sight,” said the Devil, pressing two fingers to the globe of Grace’s forehead, “because I’m gonna give you the knowledge of him, right now. Close your eyes again.”

Grace closed her eyes, and saw the bad man.

He was very ugly, not like the Devil at all. He had the teeth of a jackal, and the long, twitchy limbs of a spider. She saw ink on his left hand, which Mrs. Walters said was a sin anyway, and a Bible in his right, defaced with obscenities. She saw him creeping through the cornfields, hunched low to the ground, his feet quiet on the soft soil. She saw his face.

The Devil took his hand away, and held Grace close when she cried.

“Your daddy’s gonna do whatever you say,” said the Devil, gentle as a midwife, “and you’re gonna do whatever I say. Let me move your hands, just as if they were mine. Let me steer your feet a’right. How does that sound?”

And Grace, who was well and truly lost, said it sounded right reasonable to her.

“That’s a good girl. Now git along,” said the Devil, giving her a little nudge with his elbow. “Run along home to your daddy. He’ll be lookin’ for you.”

Grace clambered to her feet, full of all the gangly enthusiasm of youth, and took off down the road, kicking up chalk dust with every slap of her boots against the earth.

The Devil stayed sitting there, thoughtful and quiet. His feet rested flat against the earth, and far, far beneath him, he could feel the thing beneath the town begin to stir.

Days later, when he stepped out of the county lockup with his hands in his pockets and his mind on mischief, the Devil felt the stirring in the earth once more.

Too soon. Too soon.

Too soon.

Too soon.

 

Tomas sits with his cheek pressed to the cold glass of the window, watching the corn go by without really seeing it.

The back seat of Dr. Bennett’s car is hot and cramped, with leather seats that stick to Tomas’ sweaty skin. Dr. Bennett is driving, gripping the steering wheel like a man on the edge, and Marcus is in the shotgun, one boot up on the dash. They’re bickering about something. Bootprints on the chrome polish, maybe. Tomas is only half listening to them.

His mind is a spinning dervish of nausea and nervous agitation. Tomas closes his eyes, struggles to bring his consciousness to heel. The place where Marcus kissed him seems to burn. He’d been rough and casual. A too-friendly kiss, the kind a man might give another man, surely. As if he had no idea. As if he didn’t see.

 _I thought you could see me,_ Tomas thinks deliriously. The thought makes no sense, but neither does the corn. It goes on and on and on and on, forever. Surely it can’t go on forever, can it? Somewhere the corn must stop, and Chicago must begin. Chicago, where Tomas’ dreams had been sweet and easy, where the most he had to worry about was getting the funding to buy a new piano for the church.

Tomas groans, his eyes still closed, and rubs his forehead against the glass as if trying to wipe something off. Marcus had kissed him there. Last night, Tomas had nearly died. Something had slipped down his throat and curled up in his belly and almost killed him. Nothing happened. This morning, Marcus kissed him. Nothing happened. The sunlight is bright against Tomas’ closed eyes and still they burn. Headache, headache, headache. And Bennett’s still talking.

Tomas forces his eyes open and blinks wearily at the world. He finds that Marcus has twisted around in his seat and is looking at him, his face dark with concern. “You okay?” he asks, his voice a quiet hiss.

 _“Si,”_ says Tomas, because the language is a comfort on his tongue and he needs a little comfort right now. He won’t get it from Marcus. Marcus won’t kiss him again. Nothing will happen. Nothing will ever happen. Tomas shifts in his seat and lays his head back against the headrest. He bounces a little with every bump in the country road.

Tomas had felt a good and confusing something when he came to that lockup, and saw Marcus there, pacing in his cage. He had a hungry, half-feral look to him. It ought to have been ugly, seeing him so trammelled. The world was his parish, God-given. He ought to be out under the desert sky, but here he was instead, pacing and snarling like an animal with no place to run. Tomas could almost imagine a tail lashing back and forth in irritation.

As Sheriff Morrow’s hand was still turning the key in the lock, Marcus had met Tomas’ eyes. That hungry, half-feral look was still there, like the look in a jackal’s eyes before it howls, and for one trembling moment, Tomas had wondered what Marcus was going to do to him when that cell door opened.

 _I’d let him,_ came the thought that followed, a thought that made something hot and good-nervous throb below Tomas’ belt. Let him what, he did not know. But he’d let him.

Bennett’s still talking, something about how he barely knows Andy Kim, isn’t even sure how many kids he has at this point. Marcus is saying something cocky, his boot still up on the dash, but he keeps shooting Tomas over-the-shoulder glances that make him uneasy. He doesn’t look that bad, does he? God, the sun is bright.

The car stops, and Tomas leans forward to touch the shoulder of Bennett’s expensive, out-of-fashion suit. _“¿Por qué nos hemos detenido?”_ he whispers hoarsely.

“We’re at your house, Father,” Bennett says sternly, looking over his shoulder at him with a narrow-eyed look. Tomas wonders if this is how Bennett shows concern.

 _“Bueno,”_ says Tomas. _“Estupendo. Gracias.”_

He opens the door.

 

He wakes up in bed.

It’s the bed downstairs, the dead man’s mattress. Appropriate, since Tomas feels like a dead man.

“Thank you, Jesus,” he hears Marcus breathe from somewhere to the right. “Thank you Mary, mother of God.”

 _“Qué,”_ Tomas mumbles, sitting up in bed. He’d been tucked in under one of the quilts from the closet, and he only realizes after he sits up that he’s still fully dressed. He spies his shoes tossed haphazardly in the corner of the room.

Marcus is sitting next to his bed, white-faced and tense. There’s a knife in his hand that he’s tapping restlessly against his thigh. His rosary is in the other. He looks ill.

“You passed out,” he explains. “In the car.”

 _“Oh,”_ Tomas murmurs. _“Lo siento.”_

“Don’t apologize, fuck . . .” Marcus stammers, running his hand down his face and cupping it over his mouth. “You were out for almost twenty minutes. It was a long twenty minutes.”

 _“Lo siento,”_ Tomas says again. _“Mi cabeza . . . pero me siento mejor ahora.”_

“I’m glad. I’ve been praying for you.”

_“¿Dónde está Bennett?”_

“He’s in the kitchen,” Marcus laughs weakly. “He wouldn’t leave until he knew you were okay.” He leans forward, his hands wringing nervously together. He looks Tomas up and down, just the once. “Tomas?”

_“Si?”_

“Father Tomas Ortega?”

 _“Si?”_ Tomas says again, in increasing confusion.

“What’s my name?”

_“Padre Marcus Keane.”_

“And the name of the town that we’re in?”

_“Snakespring.”_

“Do you . . . speak English?”

“. . . I do,” says Tomas, after a long pause. _Why did I pause so long,_ he thinks.

“Good,” says Marcus. “Good.” He leans back in his chair, runs his hand through the buzzed hair along his scalp. He exhales; his body loses tension like a snapping bowstring. “Lie down,” he says. “Don’t be afraid of falling asleep. I’ll be back.”

“No,” Tomas says hurriedly, moving as if to stand up, but then Marcus’ hand is on his shoulder and he’s pushed him back down.

“I’m just going to the kitchen,” he says gently. “Please lie down.”

It’s a request, not an order, and it’s for this reason that Tomas complies. He lies there with the morning sun playing across him from the open window and listens to the muffled murmurs of fierce conversation between Marcus and Bennett.

Several minute later, Marcus comes back with a mug in each hand. He shuts the bedroom door behind him with his hip, and offers one of the mugs to him, handle first.

Tomas takes it and nearly burns his hand on the hot porcelain. He sits up again, adjusts a pillow behind his back so he can sit comfortably. He sips, expecting coffee, and is surprised by the sweet, unmistakable taste of hot milk.

Marcus sits next to the bed and scoots his chair forward. He reaches out, gives Tomas’ knee a brief squeeze. “Tell me everything,” he says.

Tomas does.

 

_Harvest moon._

_Blood moon._

_The sun like black sackcloth over the vast horizon._

_He comes to consciousness with his head ringing and blood leaking out of his ears. His breaths come in short, gasping rattles; has something punctured a lung? He can’t be sure. Crows flutter around him, pecking and shrieking. He can’t breathe. The pain in his hands makes him want to faint._

_Slowly, Tomas comes back to himself. Becomes aware of the pain, the crows, the cornfield rustling low and loud in every direction. He can see for miles, from all the way up here. Arms spread, lungs useless, bleeding out, out, out. Delirious. The world tilts around him as his vision gains and loses focus. A crucifixion on a scarecrow’s cross. This is what death is. This is what it is to stand before God and know His indifference._

_Tomas rips one hand free, and then the other, and because it is a dream, he does not die. He hits the earth hard and chokes on the stinking country air. The cornstalks sway in the wind, miles and miles in every direction. He can hear them rasping together like a chorus of hangman’s gasps._

_He fists his hands in the dirt and feels its pulse. Something is moving, under there. Something is alive._

_The world seems to shatter into a thousand needles of light, driving into the globe of his eye. Tomas bends double and clutches his face, smearing it with dirt and crucifixion blood. The whole earth cries out; the Devil, the Devil, the Devil is coming, the Devil. He is coming to be a father to his child. He is coming to put the thing in the earth to rest._

_Tomas scrambles to his feet and runs blindly through the corn. He can hear a mad flurry of footsteps behind him, heavy boot heels thumping against the earth. He can’t outrun it. He fights his way through the corn, slicing up his hands, his eyes, his nostrils, but the footsteps keep pace with him. He hears the shriek of metal on metal, a shrill cry of, “Daddy!” and-_

woke with his stomach twisting itself into knots, his throat closed up, his lungs flexing and taking in no air. Tomas had screamed into silence, writhing on the bed and twisting up the blankets around his knees. He clutched at his belly, his heart, his throat. Something was inside him. Something was _killing him._

Tomas hurled himself from his bed and landed hard enough to bruise his knees on the floor of the attic. He scrambled across the floor and slammed his hand down on the windowlatch, wrenching the attic window up and open.

Tomas pitched himself halfway out of it in desperation and heaved, but nothing came up. He tried to cough, or vomit, but all he could do was choke. He laced his fingers together and slammed his hands into his belly as hard as he could. Again. Again. Again.

He could feel it in his throat, then. Something rising in his gorge.

He leaned even further out the window, almost upside-down, and coughed again. Something black splattered on the ground below. He coughed again. More black.

Then it spilled from his mouth all at once. Long and thin and wet and scaly. It curled itself up and flicked its forked tongue at the globe of Tomas’ eye.

Tomas let out a choked gurgle and seized the snake by the head. He dragged it out, inch by agonizing inch. It hurt like he’d been swallowing razorblades on a string only to pull them up again. It hurt like the skin of his throat was turning inside out.

When he finally coughed the thing up, it was three feet long and coiling wickedly in his hand, like an obscene parody of the snakes he was expected to hold before his parish. Tomas hurled it down to the earth below and didn’t wait to see it land. He was already running for the stairs.

Tomas stormed out through the front door, stopping only to put on the heaviest and wickedest boots he owned. He found the snake on the ground where it landed, rolling over and over and over, like it was dying.

Tomas stamped it into pulp beneath his boot heels and laughed like a madman while he did it.

He stood there, half-dressed and breathing heavily under the midnight moon. Black ichor had slicked his chin and neck. He was shaking.

 _“Upon thy belly shalt thou go,”_ he spat with all the righteous fury of a country preacher, scuffing a little dirt over the serpent’s bloody remains, _“and dust shalt thou eat, all the days of thy life.”_

He went inside. Turned on every light. Sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the wall, unblinking, until morning broke, and he heard the sound of Dr. Bennett’s car outside.

 

Marcus’ hands are clenching and unclenching on the arms of his chair as he listens. Tomas can’t stop staring at them. There’s a tattoo on the back of his wrist, two concentric circles. They’ve been inked in roughly, carelessly, like a prison tattoo. He thinks of Marcus pacing that holding cell, and bites his lip.

God was in those hands. He worked through them, blessed them, loved them. To think, a thousand years from now, those bones might be holy. Tomas wondered idly if they might find their way into a reliquary somewhere, for pilgrims to pay homage to. The knucklebones of St. Marcus, the exorcist.

“That’s not going to happen anymore,” Marcus says quietly. His voice is shaking when he says it, and when Tomas looks up from his hands, he realizes Marcus’ face is twitching.

“What’s not going to happen?” he asks.

“The nightmares. They’re not going to happen anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do!” Marcus snaps. He buries his face in his hands, rubs his eyes. “I just . . . do. I’ll take care of it. I’ll handle it.”

“Hey,” says Tomas gently, reaching out to brush his fingers against Marcus’ shoulder. “Hey, shh. Shh.”

He expects Marcus to shrink away from his hand, but he doesn’t.

“Tell me what to do,” Tomas says. He sets his now-empty mug of milk down on the bedside table. Marcus had barely touched his. “Tell me what to do, and we’ll do it together.”

“We do nothing,” says Marcus, his voice muffled in his hands.

“What?”

“I mean, we wait. We wait for the Devil to show his hand, and then we . . .”

He looks terrible. Tomas’ hand is still on his shoulder; he can feel his whole body shaking under his hand. He looks like he’s about to cry.

“Just . . . rest,” Marcus says finally, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. He leans back in his chair, and Tomas’ hand falls away. “Sleep. I have to think this through, and . . . we need to lay low for a while. You have a sermon to write, don’t you?”

“We can’t just do nothing, Marcus.”

“What I need to do is pray. And what you need to do is sleep.”

Tomas can feel the prickling of goosebumps on his arms, and cold sweat on the back of his neck. “No,” he says quietly. “The nightmares will come back. I can’t.”

“They won’t,” says Marcus sharply, and there’s such a sudden ferocity in his voice that Tomas is taken aback. “I promise you, they won’t.”

Tomas wants to argue, but Marcus’ is a voice that brooks no argument. Slowly, he lies back down, and lets Marcus tug the quilt back up over him, up to his chin.

He can feel the warmth of Marcus’ hand on his chest, even through the fabric. “I’m going to go pray,” he says gently. “It’s . . . it’s the best I can do right now.”

Marcus stands up, and Tomas feels the sudden, overwhelming desire to be kissed. _Please,_ he thinks, _don’t go,_ but Marcus has already slipped silently out the bedroom door, leaving it open just a crack behind him.

Tomas doesn’t want to sleep, not after last night, but he’s far too tired to keep his eyes open.

He doesn’t dream at all.

 

It’s mid-afternoon when Tomas wakes up. The sun is low in the sky, filling the bedroom with the orange-and-gold glow of a summer afternoon. Tomas wakes up sweating from the heat; there’s no breeze, no movement of the still country air that might relieve him. He sits up, still fully dressed and rumpled, and covers his yawn with the back of his hand.

His eyelids are still heavy, heavy, heavy. Sleep beckons to him like a neglected lover.

Tomas shuffles lazily out into the hall, and out through the kitchen onto the porch. He finds Marcus there, sitting in the rocking chair as usual. He has one foot up on the porch railing, rocking himself back and forth. His eyes are half-closed, but gleaming. He fingers the knife strapped to his leg, and doesn’t look at Tomas when the boards of the porch creak under his footsteps.

They look out over the cornfields, which stand silent in the lack of wind. The sun is hot and punishing as it bakes the earth.

Cautiously, as though putting a hand on the flank of a spooked horse, Tomas rests his hand on Marcus’ shoulder. At once he wishes he could give him more than just a touch. “May I pray with you?”

“Yes,” Marcus says, without hesitation. He tilts his hat forward on his head, so it covers his eyes, but he doesn’t shrug Tomas’ hand away.

Tomas hesitates, then gives his shoulder a little squeeze. He gets on his knees next to Marcus’ chair and holds out his hands, both of them.

Marcus’ arm twitches, as if he were about to move it. Then he shifts a little in his seat, and takes Tomas’ hands in both of his own.

Tomas bows his head, and closes his eyes. “Father God,” he begins, his mouth suddenly dry, “You are our Blessing, and our great Hope; our Remedy, and our Benefactor. Father and Consoler, Lover and Counselor. In Your arms, we are redeemed. By Your counsel, our blackened souls have become pure.”

“We pray in gratitude and thanksgiving,” Marcus continues, “that You will continue to nurture, discipline, and care for Your children. You are a Pillar of Fire in the desert, guiding us through the night.”

“Let us stand fast against the wickedness of the Devil.”

“Let Your love enfold us.”

“In the name of the Jesus Christ the Redeemer, amen.”

“Amen.”

Tomas opens his eyes, and all the weariness and fear of the past day leaves him, as though carried on a single exhaled breath. Marcus is watching him. His eyes, cast in darkness by the brim of his hat, seem to shine like blue jewels in the secluded earth. Tomas looks away, back at the corn. There’s something undefinable in Marcus’ expression and Tomas doesn’t dare think of what it might be.

“The Devil came to me, you know,” says Marcus quietly. “In the county lock-up. He was there.”

Tomas thinks this ought to frighten him. It doesn’t.

“He told me,” says Marcus. Tomas hears him swallow. “He told me . . . to leave him alone. He told me I shouldn’t challenge him.”

“You have to,” Tomas says, without hesitation.

“He told me he would hurt us. Hurt you.”

“Let him.”

“No, Tomas,” Marcus says, this time with a weary, derisive snort. “Fucking no.”

“We have to do something.”

“Like what? We can’t kill him, can’t bloody well exorcise him . . . the Devil holds all the cards, and he knows it. We can’t touch him.”

“There is always something,” Tomas says, almost angrily now, because Marcus just can’t seem to see it. _“Always.”_

Tomas can remember years ago, when he was a young man doing missions work in Nicaragua, he had gone out walking with Father Jonas, the leader of his missions group. They had walked far, far from anyone else, and out in the fading twilight, Tomas had asked him the million dollar question.

_Why is there evil in the world?_

Father Jonas had thought it over for a good long while. Then he’d put his hand on Tomas’ shoulder, and told him this:

“Thomas,” he had said, because he’d been saying it for weeks and Tomas hadn’t corrected him the first time, “how did your father act, whenever he saw you come home from school with your hands all bruised from fighting?”

 _Angry,_ Tomas had thought. _Not at me, but at the ones who’d done it. He knew I only defended myself, and he wished I didn’t have to._

“Our Father,” Jonas continued, “feels the same when He sees us in pain. Now, the Devil cannot hurt God. He can’t touch Him. No one can. But what he _can_ do, is hurt His children. That is all he can do, and that is why there is evil in the world. Do you understand?”

The memory of that encounter was burned into his mind, as clear as a ringing bell. “Hurting the child,” Tomas whispers quietly, almost to himself, “to hurt the father . . .”

“What’s that?” says Marcus, looking down at Tomas where he kneels beside his chair.

Tomas looks up at him and narrows his eyes. “We have to kill the thing sleeping under Snakespring.”

Marcus laughs weakly, but his eyes widen at Tomas’ words. “You’re serious?”

Tomas nods.

Marcus looks steadily back at him. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, but . . . I can’t do it alone.”

 _“We’ll_ do it,” Tomas clarifies, stressing the words. _“We_ will. Together. As partners.”

“Partners,” Marcus says drily. “Sounds like a fucking Western.”

“That’s a yes, isn’t it.”

“Yeah. Partners.”

Tomas smiles.

Then, and only then, do they finally let go of each other’s hands.


	6. Chapter 6

“You want us to _find_ it?” says Cherry, astonished. “I though you were ‘an exorcist, luv.’ Isn’t this more your payroll?”

Les is at the door, flipping the _Open_ sign to _Closed_. “Honey, it’s us he’s talking to. We could triangulate supernatural bullshittery in our sleep.”

“See, that,” says Marcus, his attention focused on the tangerine he’s halfway through peeling, “that is what I like to hear. So can you do it?”

“I said we could do it, sure,” says Les, “but I didn’t say we could do it like _that,”_ He snaps his fingers for emphasis.

Cherry shakes her head. “It could take us days to do that kind of research,” she says. “And even if we _could_ find the source of the evil under the down, there’s fuck-all even you could do about it.”

Tomas is leaning on one of the nearby bookshelves, between G for Geography and J for Jamaica, grinding his teeth in discomfort. He’s immediately uncomfortable in this place, with its dim shadows and its librarians with too-bright smiles. Cherry and Les operate smoothly together, as though intimately familiar with the other’s movements. He’s even caught them finishing each other’s sentences. It makes him feel stiff and uncomfortable in a way he can’t quite define. Looking at them gives him a headache.

They say Marcus’ name like it’s the title of a book they’re eager to read. Marcus looks at them the way he looked at Sheriff Morrow. _Peter,_ he’d called him. Since when did Sheriff Morrow have a first name?

“Let me worry about that. How quickly can you find it?” asks Marcus, who is still eating the tangerine. Tomas has been watching him, his eyes fixed on his hands as he digs his nails into the soft rind, peeling it back before splitting the tangerine into quarters. His hands are shining with tangerine juice up to the wrists.

“You can’t eat that in the library,” Les says absently, coming around the desk to start digging around in the contents underneath it. Tomas sees him put a number of miscellaneous items up on the checkout counter; pens in various colors, a compass, a map. Faded pamphlets that look a century old. A watch.

“He can eat whatever he wants in the library,” says Cherry, eyebrows raised innocently, and Tomas, who has been doing admirably well until now, closes his eyes and prays for strength.

Marcus gives Cherry a teasing grin, but his eyes flicker to Tomas as he stands by the wall.

“We can work on this the best we can,” says Les, spreading out the map and pressing his hands flat on either side of the town, “but it will take time.”

“Pull an all-nighter.”

“Jesus fuck,” says Cherry, biting her lip. “You’re a fucking drill sergeant when you want to be.”

Les is already applying the compass and scarlet pen to the map, drawing three wide circles in line with each other, all down the length of the town from east to west. “It’s simple enough,” Marcus says gruffly. “I know where the Devil will be every night, and I can only assume that during the day, he’s down where that . . . where that _thing_ is sleeping. You’re looking for a fissure in the earth. That’s what Tomas’ dreams showed him, and I trust Tomas’ judgement.”

“What do you mean,” Les frowns, “by _I know where the Devil will be every night?”_

Tomas stares at the ground, and hopes Marcus won’t answer. Mercifully, he doesn’t.

“You’re serious about this?” says Cherry, after a moment.

“Yes,” Marcus says solemnly. “I am.”

Cherry exchanges a look with Les, then leans back in her chair. She looks up at the ceiling, beyond which is the second floor, and the restricted section. Her posture suggests exhaustion, but her eyes burn with the fire of new possibility. The same look she wears when she looks at Marcus, and _God,_ Tomas wants to punch a wall.

“We can find it for you,” she says. “The place where it’s sleeping.”

“It’ll take time though,” says Les, bent over the map. “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“Pray,” says Tomas.

It’s the first word he’s spoken in their company.

 

“We need to get Dr. Bennett involved.”

“What, that pompous prick?” Marcus says, rolling his eyes.

“He has money, and faith. He cares about this town, Marcus, even if he claims not to. Besides,” Tomas continues, fumbling with the keys to the front door, “according to Tara, Dr. Bennett knows something about everything. If anyone in town is ready and willing to help us, it’s him.”

“What about Maria Walters?”

 _“Maria Walters_ asked me if my family had crossed the border yet,” Tomas says scornfully. He sighs heavily, wishing he’d bit the words back before he said them. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I did not mean to snap.”

“It’s alright,” says Marcus earnestly. “Fuck her, anyway.”

Tomas tries to stifle his smile as the key finally turns in the lock. The door swings open. “It wouldn’t hurt to let Dr. Bennett in on our plan.”

“The more people know, the more people are at risk.”

“Marcus-”

“We have to lay low, Tomas,” says Marcus, following Tomas inside. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive. I know what I’m about.”

“The old jackal has more than a few tricks up his sleeve,” says Andy. “You should listen to him, preacher. He has a point.”

Tomas stumbles on the kitchen floor and he cracks his knee against the table before dropping his keys with a strangled  _“Hijo de puta!”_ He lands on his ass and scrambles backwards towards the door, barely aware as he does so that Marcus has stepped in front of him.

Andy is leaning against the sink, drinking coffee out of one of Tomas’ mugs and looking thoroughly entertained. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

 _“What are you doing here,”_ Marcus snarls. _“Get out of our house.”_

Andy’s eyes are like black beetles, gleaming in the sockets of his skull. “Just checking up on you,” he says lightly. “Tara hasn’t seen you at St. Raphael’s lately. No one has. Your congregation worries about you, preacher.”

He takes another sip of his coffee and pours the rest of it into the sink. It gurgles wetly down the drain.

“How very neighborly of you,” sneers Marcus. Tomas scrambles to his feet behind him, still unsteady on his aching leg. He can see a vein throbbing in Marcus’ temple. His body is as tense as a taut bowstring.

Something moves behind Andy’s legs. Then Grace’s face peers around them, waxy and pale, before she steps out and stands with her hands folded, her feet pointed inward. She’s wearing tiny white cowboy boots today. They jingle-jangle every time she rocks back and forth on her heels.

Her eyes look like the dirty brown spots on the back of a cobra’s hood. The pupils dilate wide, and Tomas feels his heart stop, just for a moment, before resuming again.

 _I try,_ she mouths, smug and silent, and at the same moment, Andy grins and says, “I try.”

Tomas’ hand jumps to Marcus’ shoulder, almost instinctively. “Marcus,” he whispers, “her eyes.”

“I see it,” Marcus whispers back.

Andy puts his hands on his hips and takes a deep breath, exhaling heavily with a smile. “I’ll be checking up on you more often, I think,” he says confidently. Next to him, little hands clasped before her, Grace mouths _I’ll be checking up on you more often, I think._ “Just to make sure you don’t go doing anything foolish.”

“I think you need to leave,” says Tomas. “Right now.”

Marcus naturally falls back as Tomas steps forward, until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder.

Andy and Grace smile identical smiles. _Don’t dig up things best left buried,_ Grace says voicelessly. “Don’t dig up things best left buried,” says Andy, in a slow and careful voice. _Your do-gooding will come back to bite you in the ass one day._ “Your do-gooding will come back to bite you in the ass one day.”

“Maybe my partner spoke too quietly,” Marcus says, his voice rising. “You should go. Now.”

Andy holds eye contact with him for a moment, then drops his gaze, still smiling. His large, tanned hand finds Grace’s smaller one, and together they walk to the door. On the threshold he stoops, picks her up with a grunt of exertion. She loops her arms around his neck and looks over his shoulder at Marcus and Tomas, her eyes unblinking, her face too still and too cold.

She looks Tomas full in the face as she mouths, _Your fence still needs retooling. You should get that fixed._

“Your fence still needs retooling,” says Andy. “You should get that fixed.”

They step out onto the porch, and Tomas, his hands shaking, carefully closes the door behind them.

The silence in the house is deafening. The click of the lock, even more so.

Tomas looks at Marcus, and Marcus looks at Tomas. They both break out in strained, nervous laughter at the same time.

 

The encounter plagues Tomas well into the afternoon. He sits himself out on the porch, under the pretense of being full from lunch and wanting a little air, but in reality, his eyes are scanning the horizon. Andy had left bootprints in the dirt, and eventually the wind had stirred them up too thoroughly and obscured them. Tomas had begun to doubt that he’d ever been there at all.

Tomas tries to turn his attention to Scripture. His Bible is spread open in his lap, unread. He has a sermon to write, though the Devil creeps through the streets like a cancer. One more sermon before the snakes. One more Sunday before he dips his hands amid their scaly knots and holds one up before his breathless congregation, unblemished and unbitten like St. Paul himself.

Tomas can almost feel them slithering between his fingers.

He looks down at his Bible and swallows grimly. The gold-trimmed pages gleam in the afternoon sun. Ezekiel 28.

_Thou hast been perfection, full of wisdom and beautiful beyond all others. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God, and every precious stone was thy covering- red carnelian, pale-green peridot, white moonstone, blue-green beryl, onyx, green jasper, blue lapis lazuli, turquoise, and emerald- the workmanship of thy adornment was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed guardian cherub, and I have set thee so. Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire._

No line of the Bible, no book, chapter, or verse, has been without scrutiny or contention, and Ezekiel 28 is much the same. _It speaks of the Devil,_ say some. _It speaks of the king of Tyre,_ say others. Tomas leans back in his rocking chair and puts his boots up on the porch railing, an unconscious imitation of Marcus, and wonders what he himself believes.

He hears a cough from the door, and glances up to find Marcus slouched in the thresh hold, a half-empty glass of iced tea in one hand as he gestures to the worn-out picket fence surrounding the dusty lot of Tomas’ property. “He was right you know,” he says. “The fence. It needs retooling.”

Tomas looks at the fence, which is wilting like waterless flowers, and has to agree. As is par for the course with old houses, it was only after Tomas had moved in that he realized the place was in need of every improvement. The shower rattled ominously when it was turned on. The windows stuck and needed jamming. The porch, which creaked like an ancient thing, looked like it must house innumerable wasp nests.

“It does,” says Tomas off-handedly, returning his attention to his Bible. “I’m not one for handiwork, though, coming from Chicago. I’d hire Andy to do it but he’d probably murder me in my sleep.”

Marcus sets down his glass on the porch railing with a little _click._ Tomas hurriedly puts his feet down so he doesn’t knock it off. “I could take care of that for you, if you like,” Marcus says lightly.

“Oh?”

“I wouldn’t have managed to scrape by as an exorcist these many years without taking on a few odd jobs. I’m hardly passing around collection plates,” says Marcus, folding his arms. He’s rocking back and forth on the balls of his heels, like a child who’s been told to stand still. Restless.

Tomas hates to see him restless.

“You need something to do, don’t you,” he says, almost apologetically, and Marcus looks at him like his heart has just cracked in half.

 _“Yes,”_ he says. He looks like he’s about to say something else, but he swallows it. _He needs to be needed,_ Tomas thinks, and that’s enough to convince him.

“I’d like that,” he says without hesitation. “I’d love that, actually. You can start on the south side and work your way around.”

Marcus grins widely and squeezes Tomas’ shoulder. His hand is heavy and warm, and the sensation of being touched lingers on Tomas’ skin long after Marcus has taken his hand away. “Thank you for indulging me,” he says, half-joking. “I like to be kept busy.”

“Hang on,” says Tomas at his back, as he walks down the steps into the yard. “Don’t leave that here!” He gestures at the half-finished iced tea. “I’ll drink it if you do.”

Marcus shrugs lazily without looking back at him. Just to spite him, Tomas takes a sip of the iced tea, expecting bitterness. Instead he finds it sweet, and cold.

 

Two hours later, and Tomas hasn’t written a single line.

The work, which largely involves digging up the fenceposts and re-spacing or discarding them, is exhausting. The posts and boards that are rotten, too weathered or warped, are discarded in a jumbled heap by the porch steps. Marcus does what he can with the ones that remain, but without new posts to replace the rotten ones, there will be gaps in the fence.

Tomas barely thinks of the gaps in the fence. Barely thinks of anything but the Bible, spread out in front of him, and the same chapter which he’s read twenty times by now, retaining none of it.

Every time he glances up, Marcus is there. Digging. Sweating in the mid-afternoon sun. He’d peeled his shirt off an hour ago, complaining of the heat, and he’d left it draped over the porch railing at Tomas’ feet next to the now-empty glass of iced tea. Tomas can see his skin, really see it, for the first time. His back is a menagerie of white scar tissue, as though subjected to the lash. Once or twice, Marcus catches him looking, and Tomas looks back down at the Bible hurriedly, his cheeks coloring.

It feels like a private thing, too private, to see those scars. There’s a particularly ugly-looking snarl of them across Marcus’ left shoulder, black and wicked against the surrounding skin. For one brief moment, Tomas imagines sponging them out. A damp cloth, wrung out in the sink. _Hold still._ Marcus, fidgeting and squirming under his hand. He never could hold still, that man. Tomas catches himself smiling about it, then quickly schools his face into a neutral expression.

He looks down, keeps reading. He has a sermon to right. A parish to please.

_Thou was perfect in they ways from the day that thou wast created, until iniquity was found in thee. Thy rich commerce filled thee with violence, and thou has sinned; therefore I banished you as profane from the mountain of God. I expelled thee, guardian cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire. Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, and by reason of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom. I cast thee to the ground, and expose thee before kings that they may behold thee._

Tomas reads the words, but does not see them. His mind is too full to think, too full to write.

 _Don’t look,_ he thinks angrily. _Don’t look._

He looks. Marcus is leaning on one of the fenceposts, his eyes closed, his lined face peacefully exhausted. His back curves as he stretches, rubbing the ache from the back of his neck with one hand.

Tomas watches the movement of his throat as he swallows.

He stands up abruptly, slamming the Bible shut and leaving it on the rocking chair as he storms inside. “Tomas?” Marcus says in confusion, but his voice is already fading as Tomas sweeps into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him. He presses his back up against the door and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, frustrated and flustered and aching to be touched. He feels like a teenager again. A stupid, stumbling, sinful teenager again.

Tomas turns the tap on the sink and splashes his face with cold water, berating himself silently for his distractible mind. So many years sent in prayer, in devotion, and still he is as skin-hungry as he was when he entered seminary. He’s weak for this. Perverse.

It had been the same with Jessica, when he’d known her. She had flattered him so beautifully, made him feel _special._ Laughed so sweetly the first time he rejected her. She had asked if his halo was as tight as his collar.

Marcus though, Marcus wore a collar too. A brother in Christ. Righteous and chastened and locked up and hidden and _beautiful_ in the clear country air.

Tomas grits his teeth and bows his head, his eyes shut tight. Marcus was no Jessica. Every word spoken between them had been fraught with double-meanings and inconsistencies, but with Marcus, intimacy and honesty had slipped from Tomas’ lips as easy as breath. Nothing should be so easy. Yet they fit together so beautifully, like hands clasped in prayer.

Tomas thumps his forehead against the bathroom mirror and closes his eyes.

He had always been blessed with a vivid imagination.

His mind was a canvas, and his fantasies painted it every color. Tomas’ grip tightens on the edge of the sink as he imagines the gleam of sweat across Marcus’ shoulder blades. The way the sun gleamed off the scars, white and terrible in their density. In the lock-up, Marcus had looked like a criminal. Like the kind of man who might look at Tomas and see only prey to brutalize. To grasp and hold and _handle._

Tomas lets out a strangled, frustrated groan and slaps himself on the thigh. _Don’t._ He does it again. _He who commits adultery in his heart as good as commits adultery in earnest._

He stares at himself in the mirror and hates what he sees. The blown-out pupils, the eyes dark with lust.

Marcus is still outside. Still working. Working for Tomas, on Tomas’ land.

Tomas takes a deep breath and leaves the bathroom. Outside, he finds that Marcus is blotting himself off with his own shirt, and stretching his aching arms. “You look tired,” says Tomas. “Can I get you a drink?”

Marcus turns around and grins at him hopefully. “I’d like that.”

 

Tomas, who has never bought a six pack of beer in his life, is surprised and less than delighted to find that Marcus has already put several of them in his fridge.

“I know your kitchen better than you do,” Marcus says, as Tomas returns to the porch with two cold beers and a sour expression. The sun has already begun to set, and Marcus, who had gone inside for a quick shower before sitting on the porch steps to wait for Tomas, is looking clean and happy and pleasantly worn-out. He accepts the beer gratefully and cracks it open with a hiss.

Tomas opens his as well, but doesn’t drink. “I wish you wouldn’t help yourself to my food,” he says, though even as the words leave his mouth he wonders if that’s really true. “This is not your home.”

Marcus is silent for a moment as he drinks, eyes closed. He gasps as the bottle leaves his mouth, and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. “You’re right,” he says shortly. “I’m sorry if I’ve been too familiar.”

“No, no,” says Tomas hurriedly. “It’s not that. It’s just, you said _'our house'_ when you were talking to Andy, and I . . .”

“Did I?” Marcus says cautiously. “I don’t . . .”

“I could be remembering it wrong.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

They watch the sun go down over the cornfield. Tomas glances over at him occasionally and wonders how he does it, how he wears the same clothes as Tomas but manages to make them look dangerous. He’s in his clericals now, collar and all, though his jacket is tugged on against the onset of the evening’s chill. Tomas is still in a tee and sweats, which he’s starting to regret as the sun dips ever closer to the horizon.

“The stars’ll be out soon,” says Marcus. He looks tired, now that Tomas has a chance to see him in the failing light. The shadows under his eyes are as dark and as permanent as the tattoo on his wrist.

“You should sleep,” Tomas says gently.

“I can’t.”

“It’s cold out here. It’ll be even colder once night falls, and the wind comes in.”

“I don’t mind the cold,” says Marcus. He takes another swig of beer. “And the night doesn’t trouble me anymore. I’ve spent more than a few nights out under the stars.”

“That’s very . . . romantic.”

“Of course you’d think so.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, you’re a poet at heart,” says Marcus. He rolls his bottle cap back and forth between his fingers like a coin. “The way you talk. The way you formulate your thoughts.”

Tomas smiles. “Am I so obvious?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” says Marcus. “King David was a poet too.”

“Yes, but he was also a king. I am only a preacher.”

“A preacher’s poetry is worth just as much as a king’s.”

“Meaning, not much.”

“Basically, yeah.”

Tomas laughs, and is privately thrilled when Marcus laughs with him. He gestures at the distant sun, casting its orange glow over the corn. “How many sunsets have you seen over the desert?”

“More than enough,” says Marcus. “Too many sunsets and not enough sunrises.”

“You should settle down,” says Tomas, before he realizes what he’s saying. “Have you ever thought about that? Settling down?”

The corner of Marcus’ mouth twitches, but he doesn’t smile. He gives Tomas a tired, heavy look. “In this business,” he says, “you have to make sacrifices. I’ve given up a lot, for my faith and my calling. Family. Friends.”

“Love?”

“Yeah, love.”

Tomas mouth is suddenly dry, but he swallows, and speaks anyway. “You know,” he says, “our Lord made us for love. To love and be loved by Him, and to love one another,” Marcus says nothing. Tomas soldiers on. “I do not think He would make his children live without love. No matter what He has called them to do.”

Marcus is silent.

Tomas frowns shakily. Looks down at his hands, rolls his beer bottle back and forth between them. “He . . . called me here, you know,” he says. “To Snakespring. To be the preacher.”

“Have you . . .” Marcus says. Tomas hears him swallow. “Have you figured out why? Do you know why?”

Tomas looks at him. “I’m starting to think I might.”

A smile flickers across Marcus’ face, and is gone just as quickly. He looks away, drains the last of his beer in one swallow. “I’m not really a priest, you know,” he says as he wipes his mouth. The words seem to spill out of him, unchecked. “I used to be, but not anymore.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

“And you said nothing?”

Tomas shrugs. The cold is starting to get to him; the tension in his shoulders is making them ache. “The collar is . . . an immeasurable comfort,” he says finally.

“It is, yeah,” Marcus agrees. “It's the greatest comfort I've ever known. The _only_ comfort I have ever known.”

“Who tried to take it from you?” Tomas asks. The question comes out a little more forcefully than he meant it to.

Marcus chuckles humorlessly. “Exorcisms are not regarded favorably within the Church. They find me archaic. Embarrassing. Once they had got all the use they were going to get out of me, they excommunicated me. I can’t even take communion now.”

“But you wear the collar to spite them,” Tomas says, trying to smile.

“Yeah,” says Marcus, “. . . to spite them.”

He reaches up, almost absent-mindedly, and touches the collar at his throat. He runs his thumb across the glimpse of white just beneath his Adam’s apple. “They may have divorced me from the Church, but this is a covenant with God. They can’t divorce me from that.”

Tomas moves without knowing what he’s doing, and realizes only after the fact that he’s reached out to touch the square of white at Marcus’ throat. Marcus keeps his chin tilted up, as still as a statue, his eyes on the sun. Like a man with a knife at his throat, waiting for the final thrust.

“Don’t take this off,” Tomas says softly. “Don’t ever take this off.”

His hand leaves Marcus’ throat, and Marcus breathes again.

“I won’t,” he says. “That will be my covenant with you.”

The sun sets fully below the horizon, but neither of them care that it’s gone.

 

Tomas dreams of the sweet smell of clove cigarettes.

_He doesn’t feel the mattress under him; only the hard, plasticky skin of a truck bed. The stars are strewn across the heavens above him, not haphazardly, but by design. Placed there, each in their turn, by a loving Creator who knows them all by name._

_There’s a warm hand clasped with Tomas’ own. A plume of sweet-smelling smoke, and a rough-soft voice murmuring, “There it is, the morning star.”_

_In this dream, this half-sleeping half-waking nighttime fantasy, it would be the easiest thing in the world to roll over and claim the source of that sweet breath with his mouth. To kiss the taste of cloves and honey from the lips of the righteous man beside him. There is no shame, no embarrassment. God looks down on them and smiles to see them happy._

Tomas shifts a little in his sleep, his mind full of sleepy, lazy dreamthought. He rolls onto his belly, the blankets tangled up around his legs, and rubs the side of his face against his pillow as though seeking something. He pushes his hips roughly against the mattress, just once, and does no more than that. A muffled whine escapes him, quiet and frustrated in the silence of the attic. He doesn’t wake up.

He sleeps restlessly for the rest of the night, but his dreams are the sweetest he’s ever had.

 

The cornstalks sway moodily in the dark. The moonlight gives them a bluish, alien glow, like the rippling surface of the ocean. A sour-sweet wind blows from the West.

The exorcist sits quietly on the porch and stares into the middle distance. His eyes ache from exhaustion, but he does not close them.

The rosary dangling from his left hand sways in the wind, knocking against the arm of the chair. The knife in his right hand is being tapped aimlessly against his thigh; the denim is so familiar with the edge of that blade that it’s beginning to fray. Familiar words are embellished in the blade in Latin- _and put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite._

The exorcist stares deep into the shadows cast by the swaying sycamores, and the rustling cornstalks. He is not surprised when, as though conjured from the dust, the Devil steps from the shadows and smiles at him.

He walks up closer to the house and stands there, hands in his pockets, observing. The Devil looks at the exorcist, and the exorcist looks at the Devil.

The Devil holds out his left hand, fingers spread, and whispers something in the Old Tongue to the thing sleeping beneath the town. The earth opens beneath him, just a little, like a split lip or a ripped stitch, and up from the dirt and the depths and the damp comes a nightmare. It squeezes its way out into the world and lies in a messy coil, tasting the air with its tongue.

This is a bellyache nightmare. A faint-in-the-shower nightmare. A nightmare that tastes like spoiled milk. It likes to slither into things and under things and over things, leaving sticky trails of sin wherever it goes. This is a ground-dwelling nightmare. A bottom-feeder.

It creeps on its belly up towards the porch steps. The exorcist gets to his feet, and comes down to meet it.

He slams the knife into the earth and whispers a saint’s prayer, half-remembered. The nightmare splits in two, and is dispelled.

The exorcist puts the heel of his boot against the little body’s head and wrenches the knife out of its back. _“He shall bruise thy head,”_ he whispers, _“and thou shalt bruise his heel.”_

He returns to his seat and sits. The Devil, amused but not surprised, drops cross-legged to the ground and puts his chin on his hand. He watches the exorcist wipe the knife clean on his thigh.

So it has been every night that the exorcist has been the guard dog of this house. So it is tonight.

The Devil stays all night long, not daring to move closer, not desiring to move further away. Occasionally he’ll send another nightmare, to be dispatched in the same way, and even more rarely he’ll speak. But mostly he sits, and watches, and enjoys.

The Devil is gone by daybreak.


	7. Chapter 7

Dr. Devon Bennett is a man of simple consistencies.

He lives in the second largest house in Snakespring. A tall, narrow thing of red and black bricks, as well-built as the man himself. The shutters are painted black, and the porch curls neatly around the exterior of the house, the way a cat curls its tail around its paws. There’s a cross on the door. The kids don’t ride their bikes down this street.

Bennett is respected and deferred to, if not well-liked. It is always in the best interests of his neighbors to be on good terms with the only doctor in town. Even Maria Walters makes an effort to smile at him now and then. Her husband is too sick for her to disregard him entirely.

Mostly, Bennett keeps to himself. He doesn’t talk about his leg. He leaves the lights off on Halloween night. He likes his suits black, and his coffee blacker, and he doesn’t care for most people, things, or inconveniences. There are three different canes in the rack by the door; one for Sunday, one for the rest of the week, and one for when he is feeling particularly dire.

Bennett is not accustomed to being invited to things.

What he is accustomed to, though, is routine.

He wakes in the morning alone. He dresses, prays, and eats alone. He reads no newspapers but the Snakespring Gazette, and this he reads only out of necessity. There is nothing in the outside world that interests him, just as there is nothing in Snakespring that interests the outside world.

This morning, however, is different. This morning he receives a call.

Bennett is halfway through his morning oatmeal when it happens. The landline buzzes insistently on the wall by the dining room door. Bennett takes his time wiping his mouth with a napkin before he stands up to answer it.

“Hello?” he says, leaning on the wall beside the phone. “Yes, good morning, Father Marcus. How pleasant to hear from you again.”

There is nothing in his voice when he says it. No sarcasm or sincerity. It’s as clipped and clean as a diagnosis.

The man on the other end talks for a long, long time.

Over the course of their conversation- if it could be called a conversation- Bennett moves not an inch from the place where he is standing. His face betrays nothing. His hands and eyes and heartbeat betray nothing. He is as still as a rabbit, frozen in headlights and hoping it will not be seen.

The oatmeal has long since gone cold.

When Bennett finally speaks, he says with great intensity of feeling, “I wish you had never come to this town.”

A moment’s pause. Then, “Of course I’ll be there, don’t be ridiculous.”

He hangs up, and stares at the wall. He thinks, for the first time in a long while, that he would like to sit down with a good book. Stretch out his leg in front of him with a warm bag of rice under his thigh and do nothing at all.

His leg aches like the Devil himself today. The thought makes a laugh rise up in him, a heavy exhale of half-laughter that startles him back to himself.

Bennett gives himself a mental brushing-off and lopes painfully out into the entrance hall, his oatmeal forgotten. He has work to do. Patients to attend to. Lives to save, if God wills it.

And tomorrow, he has Marcus _fucking_ Keane.

Bennett selects his direst cane with no hesitation and goes stumping off down the porch steps, towards his car. His old service revolver is in a lockbox under his bed. He wonders if he can still remember the combination.

 

Tomas comes down from the attic early in the morning and shuffles to the bathroom only to find Marcus already there, freshly showered and shaving in front of the mirror. He uses a straight razor rather than Tomas’ expensive, disposable plastic ones. Tomas catches him just as he’s carefully wiping off the blade on one of the washcloths.

“‘Scuse me,” Marcus says apologetically. He glances at Tomas, who’s still in his briefs and undershirt, and looks quickly away. “I didn’t think you’d be up so early.”

“It’s fine,” says Tomas, giving him a tight little smile and trying very hard not to think about the state in which he’d woken up this morning. “I’ll go make the coffee.”

He wanders into the living room, covering his mouth as he yawns, and throws the curtains back off the windows. It’s raining outside, for the first time he can recall since he arrived here. The sky is a dark, ugly gray on the horizon. The clouds look like scabs of clotted blood.

Tomas stretches his arms over his head, trying to rub some feeling back into his blissfully sleep-heavy limbs, and goes to turn on the coffee maker. Afterwards he shuffles to the porch door and opens it, intending to see how heavily the rain is falling.

The rain has already turned the dusty lot out front of Tomas’ house into a muddy swamp. Standing by the fence across from the front door, the wind-tossed cornstalks beating a wet rhythm against his unfeeling back, is Andy Kim.

He’s soaked to the skin, mud streaked all up the legs of his jeans. He’s as still as a scarecrow but when Tomas opens the door he looks up, gives a little wave. Tomas can see he’s holding Grace’s hand. She’s standing equally still beside him, in a yellow gingham pinafore with mud caked along the hem. Her little white boots are a dirty, rusty red now. Her eyes gleam under the strings of her soaking hair.

Tomas shuts the door.

“Marcus?” he yells over his shoulder. “Have you looked outside recently?”

“It’s really coming down, innit!”

“Yes,” says Tomas weakly. “Yes, it is.”

He opens the door again. Andy and Grace are still there. He closes it again.

“I think I’ll run some errands!” Tomas yells back over his shoulder. “We’re out of most things, and I want to check in with Cherry and Les!”

“You’re going out in this?” says Marcus doubtfully. “Be careful.”

 _Be careful._ You’re going out in the rain, so _be careful._ Tomas hasn’t been told to _be careful_ since before he went to seminary.

He dwells on this as he goes back upstairs, stepping carefully; his feet are bare, and the attic steps are prone to splinters. Tomas glances out the attic window now and then as he changes, down at where Andy and Grace stand like taxidermy animals beneath the deluge. He puts on his best jeans, the heaviest boots he has, and has the foresight to put on a parka before going downstairs to face the rain.

Tomas pauses on the threshold, pats down his pockets to make sure he has his wallet and keys. Then he goes outside.

“G’morning, preacher,” say Andy and Grace, as Tomas tramps stickily through the mud towards the road. “Where are you off to on this fine morning?”

“Groceries,” Tomas say lightly. His hair is already soaked, and he slicks it back from his forehead before putting his hands in his pockets.

“I do hope you won’t be gone long.”

“Not long at all.”

“Well,” say Andy and Grace, smiling pleasantly. “Watch yourself. The rain is only going to get worse.”

Tomas waves over his shoulder at Andy and Grace as he starts walking up the side of the road, and only when the corn has obscured them from view, do Tomas’ nerves catch up to him. A cold shiver runs through him like a swallow of ice water, and he walks a little faster, his back a little straighter. He hopes they don’t know about Cherry and Les. Something tells him they probably do.

He thinks briefly of Marcus, alone in the house, but then he thinks of the knife strapped to his leg, and knows that Andy and Grace won’t dare try anything. Tomas’ senses have grown more acute with every passing day; he knows that Andy and Grace are there to watch, nothing more. When he woke up this morning, still sticky with the remains of his nighttime emissions, he felt the earth move beneath him. Like the ghost of an earthquake barely felt. The things beneath the earth was falling asleep again.

Tomas looks up at the sky above him, so dark it’s almost black, even in mid-morning. The rain falls thick and cold. Something tells him that Andy and Grace were right. The rain is only going to get worse.

 

“You did what?” says Marcus incredulously. His posture is an indifferent slouch against the kitchen counter, but his arms betray him; they’re folded tightly in front of him, his hands clenched into fists.

“I had to check with Cherry and Lester,” says Tomas, who is unloading the groceries. Vegetables mostly, and a few greasy packets of chips to tempt Marcus into eating the vegetables. “What was I going to do, not leave the house all day? Look I bought corn. I am going to make _elotes.”_

“Are you fucking daft?” Marcus says in frustration. He sweeps his hand towards the door in one broad gesture. “With the come-play-with-us-Danny twins just outside our door?”

Tomas unloads the bag of corn cobs onto the counter with a heavy _thump_ and turns to prod Marcus in the chest. “They’re not going to harm us,” he says firmly. “Not without the Devil’s say-so.”

“You can’t _possibly_ know that.”

“I _can,”_ insists Tomas. He’s aware that he sounds a little frantic, that his eyes must be wild when he looks at Marcus, but he can hardly help it. He has to make him _understand._ “I don’t know how I know, but somehow . . . I do. It was perfectly safe.”

“It was perfectly _stupid,_ is what it was,” says Marcus angrily. His arms are still folded tight, his fists still white-knuckled and tense.

Tomas puts his hand on Marcus’ arm. “It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine. Please do not worry for me.”

Marcus’ fists unclench.

Tomas turns back to the groceries, resumes unloading them. “I spoke to Cherry and Lester,” he says. “They’ve got it narrowed down to a few hundred acres.”

Marcus says nothing. He reaches around Tomas from behind, plucking a bag of chips off the counter and peeling it open.

“They say they should have answers for us by tomorrow,” Tomas says. After a moment’s deliberation, he adds, “They were disappointed that you didn’t come with me.”

Marcus’ answering grunt is just noncommittal enough to drive Tomas up the wall. He sighs, goes to the nearest window and peers out through the glass and the patchy mesh screen. Andy and Grace are still there, silent as the grave.

“I called Bennett,” says Marcus quietly from behind him. “I told him everything. He'll meet us here first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Good.”

“You know it’s not that I don’t think you can take care of yourself-”

“I was taking care of myself long before I met you. We’ve known each other for less than a week.”

“I know,” Marcus says weakly. “I know.”

It’s quiet between them as Tomas finishes unloading the groceries. Marcus takes the vegetables, puts them in the fridge for him. All in silence.

“I don’t see why you had to buy corn,” Marcus mumbles, leaning on the open door of the fridge. “You could’ve just reached out a window.”

“That would be thievery, Marcus. I would need to confess.”

 _And I am the only priest in town,_ Tomas thinks bitterly. The bitterness passes through him as soon as it arrives, leaving him with only a feeling of guilt, and a vague need to clear the air.

“I feel like I need to clear the air,” says Marcus, and Tomas quickly gestures for him to settle down.

“No,” he says hurriedly. “No, you were right. I should not have gone out.”

“No,” says Marcus. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It was reckless.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see why you should be so upset about it.”

Marcus remains silent.

Tomas soldiers on. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Marcus’ arm twitches, as if he’s about to move it. Then he reaches out and puts his hand on Tomas’ shoulder. “I don’t know what I’m up against here,” he says gently. “The Devil is difficult to outmaneuver, and I . . . I want you to think I know what’s going to happen.”

“I know.”

“I don’t.”

“I know that too,” says Tomas. He lets Marcus’ arm slip around his neck as he leans in to bump his shoulder against Marcus’ chest. “We’re going to be alright. Both of us.”

 

The day is spent in prayer, and when they’re not praying, they’re sitting and busying themselves the best way they know how.

Tomas finally peels all the sheets off the furniture in the living room and settles in on the couch. Now and then Marcus crosses in front of him, going to check the window yet again. He always comes back looking more uncomfortable and dejected than before, and Tomas knows that Andy and Grace are still there.

Eventually Marcus sits down on the couch next to him and takes off his boots. They sit together, Marcus drawing in his Bible and Tomas writing sermons out of his, and if Tomas happens to rest his back against Marcus’ shoulder as he’s getting comfortable, Marcus says nothing about it.

There’s an easy silence between them. All Tomas can hear is the rain, and their pencils, and the soft, rhythmic sound of Marcus’ breath.

The sound of soft graphite on delicate Bible pages is quickly becoming an indescribable comfort to Tomas. Now and then he’ll peer over and get a glimpse of what Marcus is drawing, and Marcus will silently open his Bible wider to let him see. Tomas watches a flock of crows take shape beneath his hands, complete with wicked little eyes and long, black talons. Now and then Tomas will offer his notebook to Marcus, asking him if his latest paragraph comes across well in English even though he knows it does, and Marcus will read it and return it to him with a nod and a barely-concealed smile.

Hours pass in this way. Tomas realizes after a while that he hasn’t checked on Andy and Grace recently, hasn’t even felt the need to. Eventually they’ll have to get up, get ready for the onset of the evening. Tomas will make _elotes,_ and Marcus will eat most of them. They’ll talk while they eat, mouths full, arguing about things they won’t remember in the morning. And then Tomas will go up to bed, and Marcus will remain below. Sleepless and watchful. Pacing the floor.

Tomas can see their whole evening laid out before them. He can almost imagine their lives laid out before them, if he lets himself.

 

Tomas used to be afraid of thunder, when he was a little boy. Thunderstorms came rarely to his _abuela’s_ house, but when they did, they fell upon it with a nightmarish intensity. His  _abuela_ could sleep through anything, but Tomas stayed up late, shivering under his blankets and praying for a guardian angel.

That had been years ago. But Tomas, standing in the attic window and looking out at the storm descending on Snakespring, is powerfully reminded of it now.

The attic is cold, cold, cold tonight, and Tomas, shivering in only his briefs and undershirt, goes to tug a blanket off the bed and wraps it around himself to keep warm. Back in Chicago he’d had a robe he was fond of, a heavy blue one criss-crossed with a diamond pattern. He hadn’t packed it when he left. Why hadn’t he packed it?

Outside, the storm lashes the house with rain. The wind rattles the attic window in its frame. Tomas knows that if he reached out and touched the sill, it would be damp. He thinks briefly of closing the curtains, but that would do nothing to muffle the sound of the thunder. The sound of it cracking is following closer and closer behind the lightning. The storm is getting closer.

Tomas approaches the window again, blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and peers out. The rainwater is flooding down the windowpane, turning the view into a world of warping shadows. Dimly he can make out two figures, barely-visible in the dark. One large, one small. Still standing. Still watching.

He can’t see the rocking chair on the porch without opening the window, but Tomas knows Marcus isn’t there. He’ll be inside, pacing the floor like an animal in a cage. Tapping his knife against his thigh, his hat crooked low over his forehead.

Tomas’ fingers leave condensation on the glass.

His evening prayers are muddled, desperate and distracted. Keep him safe, keep him whole. Let me touch Your divinity through him. And so on, and on, and on, until his voice gives out, and he can only sit down on the edge of his cot and think about God.

Lightning flickers, illuminating the room with a harsh white light before fading to black again.

God runs through Marcus like a bolt of lightning, or a vein of gold. Every inch of him is blessed. Chosen. Adored. All Tomas can do is flutter moth-like around him, seeking that radiant heat, but forever barred from it lest he get burned.

Tomas rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. He tucks himself into bed and tries to get comfortable on his side, but all he can think of are moths and candles, and the sound of the rain, and the pale slip of Marcus’ belly when his shirt rides up, compared to the dark, dark tan of his hands.

The rain pours down in torrents, in heavy, wet sheets that batter the roof of the house like an assault. Tomas can hear the creaking of the wood as the house groans in protest, settling its weight against its foundation. The lightning is bright enough to illuminate the attic space; black turns to red behind Tomas’ closed eyelids, and back again. Thunder follows closely after, a low swell that builds into a horrible, growling crash, before falling silent.

Tomas is cold. His mouth is dry, and his stomach is beginning to pain him. He still hasn’t finished his sermon for Sunday. The Devil knows the color of his eyes. Soon he will have to hold a diamondback rattler before his congregation and call it a miracle. Marcus said _Peter_ in a warm, fond voice. Marcus smiled at Cherry when he split the tangerine. Marcus is downstairs.

For these reasons, Tomas thinks, his hand shaking as he slips it under the waistband of his briefs, this sin can be forgiven.

He cups himself for a moment before pressing himself more firmly into his own palm. He’s hard already, and the first few cautious, stolen strokes get him leaking wetly between his fingers. _It shouldn’t be my hand,_ Tomas thinks, squeezing his eyes shut even tighter. _It should be his_.

Tomas begins to stroke himself, brushing his thumb across the wet head with every upward stroke. Dimly, in the back of his mind, he thinks it ought to feel mortifying, defiling his dearest friend in his fantasies. But now that his hand is there, between his legs, it feels as warm and natural as any other innocent pleasure.

The next peal of thunder catches him by surprise, and Tomas rubs his face against his pillow, trying to ignore the noise. It’s impossible to relax fully, not when every creak might be the sound of footsteps on the attic stairs, and every glimpse of movement from the curtains might be the door opening. Tomas tightens his hand around his cock and imagines Marcus there, at the top of the stairs, silhouetted in the dark doorway. Coming to take what’s his, whatever Tomas will offer him.

 _Everything,_ Tomas thinks desperately, _take everything_.

He strokes himself slowly, but firmly, trying to imagine the roughness of Marcus’ hands, and the gentleness with which he uses them. Tomas rolls onto his back and puts his hand over his mouth, biting down on his knuckles so he won’t make a sound. Not that Marcus would hear him over the rain and thunder.

He can imagine Marcus downstairs, sitting silently in the dark. Listening.

Tomas bites down harder to stifle his heavy breathing, and lets himself spread his legs, just a little, as he starts rocking up into his own fist. In Mexico, there are words for men who spread their legs for other men. Words that Tomas is intimately familiar with. But he can’t seem to think of them now, not when he closes his eyes like this and listens to the rain, imagining every low, growling roll of thunder is the sound of Marcus’ voice in his ear. _Amo tu cuerpo,_ in that playful, thickly-accented voice of his.

Tomas realizes that he’s mumbled the words aloud, and his cock twitches in his hand.

He rolls onto his belly, intending to grind against the mattress, but the cot squeaks loudly under him when he does so. All at once he’s fifteen again, touching himself in his childhood bedroom and trying to hide it, and Tomas freezes, stock still, listening for approaching footsteps.

There are none. Only the rain.

He lets out a shaky exhale and presses himself against the mattress, gently at first, then harder. If Marcus found him now- Tomas bites down on the pillowcase to keep from groaning- if Marcus found him now . . .

_I hope he does._

The thought makes Tomas want to cry. Just the simple act of thinking it feels like relief, like taking off his shoes at the end of a long day.

He wants Marcus to come up here, and shut the door behind him. He want to feel Marcus’ arms around him, his breath on his neck, his voice raised in ecstatic prayer. He wants to put his hands on Marcus’ waist and leave them there, to feel how lean he is under his hands. He wants to bed him. He wants to hold him. He wants, he wants, he wants.

The wanting reaches its peak inside him, a wet, warm, painful crescendo that thrums in his blood and makes his every muscle sing with tension. Tomas can feel himself seem to tighten, so close to release, and he lets out a low, frustrated moan that’s lost in a peal of thunder.

He spills into his own palm at the thought of Marcus running his hands through his hair, and the tension in his limbs leaves him all at once in a sudden, shuddering exhale of relief. He falls limp against the mattress, eyelids fluttering, chest heaving from blissful exhaustion. He barely feels the cold.

Tomas sniffs a little. Wipes his nose on the back of his wrist, and looks across the room at the attic window. Then he stands up, a little unsteady on his legs, and closes the long, white curtains.

He takes a couple tissues from the box next to the bed and cleans himself up, daubing up the mess he’d left on the sheets before he lies down on them again. He crumples the dirty tissues in one fist and leaves them lying on the floor next to the bed.

Tomas’ eyes are heavy with sleep, too heavy to keep them open. He snuggles himself down into his blankets, wrung out and spent, and wraps himself up in them as tightly as he can. He thinks of Marcus lying behind him, one arm pressing Tomas against his chest, and his other hand resting gently, almost proprietarily, on Tomas’ softening cock.

Sleep comes to him quickly. He is not troubled by the thunder.


	8. Chapter 8

Tomas is torn from his sleep the next morning by the sound of someone knocking on the door downstairs. Pounding so hard that the door rattles in its frame.

He stumbles from bed, disoriented and sleep-heavy, and tries to turn on the light. The switch clicks back and forth, but nothing happens. The storm has knocked out the power.

Tomas swears against the darkness and fumbles blindly, struggling into the nearest clothes he can find. He’s scrambling to find a coat when he thinks to look out the attic window. The rain is still pouring down, no discernible change from last night. The crops look devastated by the wind, and the lot outside, or what he can make out of it through the rain-spattered glass, has been reduced to a sticky mire of rainwater and grit.

Andy and Grace are nowhere to be seen. Tomas’ stomach drops.

He runs downstairs, the rubber soles of his boots shrieking on the attic steps, and he runs out into the living room just as the bathroom door is wrenched open and Marcus hurries out, still tugging his leather jacket on over his collar and clericals. He looks scared. Tomas meets his eye for a moment, and hopes Marcus doesn’t see that he’s scared too.

Marcus gets to the door before him and throws it open. Andy is standing there, silhouetted black against the gray, sunless morning. His chest his heaving, his shoulders rising and falling with heavy, exerted breathes. Rain pours across the threshold around him, dampening the floor, and the bitter chill of the sour-sweet wind tugs at Tomas’ clothes and makes him shiver.

 **Are these yours?** Andy says, his voice a hellish, raspy amalgamation of two voices speaking in unison. A grown man’s, and a little girl’s. Down at his sides, one in each hand, are Cherry and Lester. He’s got them by their necks, and though they kick and struggle, he holds them with a strength that’s more than human.

Andy throws them forward into the room, lets them flop wetly on top of each other in the doorway. **I told you not to try anything. This, lad, is trying something.**

 _“God, by Your name, save me,”_ Marcus snarls, taking a step backwards. His crusifix, a wicked-looking thing of black iron, is already in his hand. _“By Your might, defend my cause. God, hear my prayer; hearken to the words of my mouth.”_

 **Rites of exorcism won’t work on either of them, Marky-boy,** says Andy, taking a step forward. His wet boots squeak where he treads on the floorboards. **They’re not possessed. Only borrowed.**

He grins. Raises his arms and lets them dangle, elbows in the air, like a dead marionette. He rolls his head from side to side, then lets it hang limply in front of him before raising it again, laughing. Behind him, through the rain, Tomas can see the tiny, soaking wet form of Grace. She does the same motions along with her father. Or rather, her father does the same motions along with her.

“Jesus, fuck,” Cherry stammers, scrambling backwards across the floor, her stare fixed on Andy. “Shit that’s the Devil, that’s the fucking Devil, holy fucking shit God Jesus.”

“Marcus,” Les says desperately, reaching out to shakily put his hand on Marcus’ boot, as if checking to see if he’s real. “We found it, we know where it is, we know-” and here, hands shaking even worse, he digs into his pocket and fumbles out some paper scraps. “We found-”

Andy takes another step closer. Les and Cherry scramble backwards, stumbling to their feet and crouching, shivering, behind Marcus. Tomas takes a step forward, knowing only that he has to do _something,_ and Marcus’ arm jumps in front of him, holding him back.

 **Stay inside,** says Andy. **It’s dangerous out there.**

Tomas looks at Marcus, desperately hoping for some sort of sign that he knows what he’s doing. They exchange looks, both thinking, _there’s a back door,_ but just as they’re about to dash for it, they hear tires shriek in the lot outside.

Marcus and Tomas stare at each other, thunderstruck. “Bennett,” they say in unison.

“We have to get out,” Cherry stammers, her eyes burning, her nails sharp as they dig into Tomas’ shoulder. “We have to go, now!”

Tomas grips her arms, tries to steady her. “How did you get here?” he hisses frantically.

“We drove,” says Les weakly. “Our camper . . . we’ve got a bunch of shit in the camper.”

They hear a car door slam hard outside and Andy turns to look, his neck bending at a terrible angle to do so. Tomas can see his eyes, how dead they are as they shine in the gloom.

Bennett is out there, standing on the porch steps. It’s too dark to make out his expression, but Tomas doesn’t need to. It’s all in the set of his shoulders, the way he grips his cane, they way his hand does not shake when he holds his service revolver down at his side, rainwater dripping from the muzzle.

“It’s you, isn’t it,” he says coldly. “You’re the Devil. Marcus Keane, you brought the _fucking_ Devil into my town.”

 **Daaa-ddy!** Grace shrieks, pointing one small, pale finger at Bennett, and Andy launches himself out into the rain and slams into Bennett so hard that they both crash backwards off the porch. Tomas runs to leap to his aid but Marcus is already pulling him back- don’t, Tomas, fucking don’t, you’ll kill yourself- and he sees Bennett force Andy off him, slamming him into the porch railing with a strength that belies his size.

 _“You two,”_ Bennett yells back at the house, _“get out!”_

He fires once, but the bullet goes wide, and Andy leaps forward to slam his elbow into Bennett’s belly. That’s all that Tomas sees before Marcus yanks him back into the house, and they stumble with Les and Cherry down the darkened hallways, trying to find their way to the back door by memory alone. Marcus’ arm is tight around Tomas’ shoulders, and he’s saying something urgently in Tomas’ ear, but Tomas can’t hear a word of it. The sound of the gunshot is still ringing in his ears. Behind them, he can hear Andy’s grunts of pain and exertion, but nothing beyond that. Bennett is as silent as the grave.

“I can’t fucking see!” Les cries, and Cherry furiously shushes him. There’s a bang as someone knocks their shin against a table leg, followed by a muffled curse. Marcus.

Tomas’ shoulder slams into the wall in front of him. He scrabbles around, feeling for the latch of the back door, and finds it. The door opens with a rusty pop. “Tell me you have flashlights in the camper,” he says urgently.

They spill out the door in a panicked tangle and immediately separate, Les and Cherry clinging to each other and make a brave attempt to shield themselves from the rain, Marcus and Tomas pressing close and making no effort to do the same. Lightning splits the sky, illuminating the cornstalks tipping back and forth beyond the fence. A meat grinder of husks and leaves. Marcus has done good work on the fence; it bends under the onslaught, but doesn’t break.

“The road, the road, _the road,”_ Les says wildly, and Tomas, who needs no further persuasion, vaults the fence in one smooth leap. Marcus follows him, and together they help Cherry and Lester awkwardly clamber over. The thunderstorm is deafening, the rustling of the corn even more so. Tomas can’t hear Andy and Bennett anymore, and it’s worrisome. He presses his back against Marcus’ shoulder and sighs in relief when Marcus pushes back.

Together the four of them force a path through the corn, squeezing between the rows and trying to hide the soft skin of their hands and faces. It’s only one or two rows before they reach the road, which has almost liquified. The mud pulls at Tomas’ boots as he lurches towards Les and Cherry’s motor home, threatening to tug them off.

Behind him, he can dimly hear Les shouting to be heard over the rain. He’s got his hand on Marcus’ shoulder, the other hand full of papers that are quickly soaking through. “. . . practically on your doorstep,” he’s saying, though Tomas can only make out half the words. “. . . equidistant between the church and . . . like it knows . . . -cher always lives . . .”

Cherry stumps ahead of them, wrenching open the passenger side door. “We have things you can use,” she says, already half buried in the glove box. “Flashlights, gloves . . .”

“Is it close?” Tomas demands.

Cherry looks back at him and nods. Her lips are a tight line, and her skin, pale as rock salt. The rain is making her makeup stream down her face. She looks like a cracked painting of the woman Tomas met in the library.

“Then give us the flashlights,” Tomas says, “and you and Les get out of here.”

“You can’t be serious-”

“Do you want to face the Devil?”

“Hell no I don’t want to face the Devil,” says Cherry weakly. “But you can’t possibly think I’d just ditch you like this.”

“Then don’t do it for me,” Tomas says desperately.

They look back down the road, at where Marcus and Les have stopped. They’re arguing fiercely about something, even as they sink deeper and deeper into the mud.

Cherry looks at Tomas. “If we’re going, you’re going too.”

“No.”

“You have to.”

“My life belongs to God,” says Tomas. The truth feels comforting in his mouth. “I am not afraid of the Devil.”

“Flashlights,” says Marcus, coming up being them. His voice is curt, and cold. Scared. “Les said you had flashlights.”

Cherry hands two of them out. Big, clunky plastic things with wide bulbs, with casings an ugly faux-metallic blue. “Please tell me you know where we’re going,” says Tomas, but before Marcus even opens his mouth, they hear footsteps squelching through the mud, and the sharp, wicked sound of metal on metal.

 _“Go!”_ Marcus yells, and Cherry has no time to argue. She ducks back into the camper, Les fast on her heels, and the engine squeals to life. Marcus seizes Tomas by the arm and drags him back into the cornfield, away from the road, and the unmistakable sound of Andy’s pained, ragged breaths. “I know where it is,” Marcus whispers, his grip bruising hard on Tomas’ arm. “I know where it is. It’s so _close,_ Tomas. We were like blind men, stumbling in the dark . . .”

Something crashes through the cornstalks behind them and they take off running, slowed considerably by the mud and half-blinded by the rain whipping them in their faces. Tomas loses Marcus in the confusion as they fight their way through row after row. He trips, falls, scrambles to his feet and keeps running. “M-” he almost yells, but the name dies in his throat. He can’t give away where he is.

Tomas rationalizes with himself that it’s better if they stay separate anyway, they’ll be more difficult to catch, but that doesn’t stop him from fighting his way through the corn towards the first distant glimpse of a human figure, as lost in the field as he.

There’s a sickly moment of dark surprise when he realizes that it’s only a scarecrow, old and water-damaged and hanging limply from its cross.

In the distance, he hears a high, wailing cry of **Daaa-ddy** and he’s off again, starting to feel the beginnings of real panic. “Marcus,” he hisses desperately, giving into the need to find him, and off to the distant left, he hears an answering, “Tomas,” that sets him sprinting in that direction.

They meet in the middle, and have only a moment before the sound of their pursuer grows louder and they have to run again. “It’s here,” Marcus says, his voice full of a kind of angry despair Tomas has never heard before. “It’s supposed to be _here.”_

They force their way through one final row of corn and stand in shock, thunderstruck.

There’s a crack in the earth.

The sight of it sends pain lancing through Tomas’ skull, brief and white-hot and over before he can ever process it. _There’s a crack in the earth. There’s a crack in the earth. Too soon._

The fissure is ugly and reddish brown, like an infected wound. Tomas can almost feel the heat coming off it. He’s shocked that the rain doesn’t evaporate into steam at its touch.

Marcus drops to his knees at the edge and peers down into it, his fingers sinking deep into the mud. “I can’t see the bottom,” he says shakily. “’S too dark.”

Lightning splits the sky, and the shadows of the cornstalks flicker wildly across the ground. Tomas crouches next to Marcus, his hand on his back. He glances behind him every other moment, trying desperately to hear the difference between Andy stumbling through the corn towards them, and the crackling rustle of husks brushing against each other. “I’m going down there,” he says urgently, giving Marcus’ shoulder a squeeze before he slips one black-clad leg into the fissure, but Marcus seizes him roughly by the arm and drags him back out again.

“You _fucking_ martyr!” Marcus says frantically, raising his voice to be heard over the thunder. “I’m going first.”

“Marcus!” Tomas snarls, _“Marcus!”_ but Marcus has already sunk his hands into the dirt at the edges of the fixture and lowered himself in, legs first. He kicks desperately for a moment, looking for purchase, and manages to force one foot hard enough into the soft, earthy walls to make a foothold.

There’s a crashing noise from behind Tomas and he whirls around, leaping to his feet with his fists clenched and a prayer hiding just under his tongue. He hears a gunshot. Two. Three. Then Andy spills forth from the field, bent but not broken, his eyes as black as a crow’s wing and blood dripping from his right arm. A sizable chunk has been taken out of the muscle there. Andy grins like a man possessed.

Tomas launches himself forward, just as Bennett leaps at Andy from behind, no more than a tattered black shadow launching out of the cornfield, and they bring him down together. Tomas lands hard on his back, winded, but his grip is sure. Andy writhes in his grasp, breathing heavily and half-laughing. His elbow connects hard with Tomas’ chin and his head snaps back, white lights popping in his vision. The lightning is blindingly bright, splitting the sky again, and again, and again.

He hears Marcus scrabbling for purchase in the dirt, trying to pull himself back up, and Tomas struggles to get an arm free from the tangled knot that he’s found himself in. He tries to reach out, but before he can, he hears a sickening crunch as something under Marcus’ foot gives way, and then he’s gone.

Tomas screams. The sound is swallowed up by the storm.

He heaves himself onto all fours, Andy all but forgotten, and scrambles towards the fissure. He can still see the impressions that Marcus’ hands left in the earth, though the rain is fast washing them away. Behind him, he can hear Bennett praying loudly against the rain, and the wet crunching sound of a fist being thrown in a punch. Tomas looks back at him, desperate for he knows not what- maybe to be told what to do- and Bennett shakes the blood off his fingers and shakes his head.

 _You’ll get yourself killed,_ he mouths silently. The rain has soaked him to the skin. It drips off his leather shoes, and the lapels of his suit.

Tomas realizes that he’s right.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he swings his legs into the fissure and begins the descent, latching quickly onto the wall before he can descend into freefall, down into the dark. His hands fist tight in the soft, crumbling dirt; a shaky handhold at best. His feet naturally find the notches that Marcus’ feet left. Tomas starts to feel cold. His rainwater-soaked clothes are getting to him at last, making his skin chafe and his teeth chatter.

He clambers down, inch by painful inch, forcing his feet into the wall with every step. The fissure seems to grow narrower as he descends, and tighter. Marcus should’ve been able to halt his descent, to cut his fall short by bracing himself against both walls. Why didn’t he? Tomas can feel himself beginning to panic, and forces himself to remain calm. He knows what Marcus would do if he were here. Tomas takes a deep breath, and wishes he were here now.

The earth gives way beneath his hands.

Tomas cries out, tries to scrabble out a handhold on the wall, but the earth is coming away in thick, sludgy clumps. His feet slip. His balance fails him. Tomas falls backwards and he reaches out desperately, sure that he’ll touch the opposite wall, but he feels nothing. His fingertips are swimming in space. Darkness swallows him, and he feels an unpleasant, warm sensation in his belly, trickling out and infecting the rest of his body. Every limb feels numb. He wonders if this is what lizards feel like when they shed their skin, or what caterpillars feel like when they liquify themselves in their cocoons, only to re-solidify into something greater.

Then he hits the ground.

The impact drives all the breath from Tomas’ lungs in one harsh, violent gust of air.

He struggles to breathe. His fingers fumble with the flashlight. For one heart-stopping moment, he drops it, but his hand finds it again a moment later and he switches it on. A blaze of warm, yellowish light fills the interior space.

Above him, solid rock.

Tomas lies still for a moment, breathing heavily, his mind numb with panic. Then he slowly sits up, and pushes himself to his feet.

He reaches up and cautiously taps the rock with his knuckles. Solid. His flashlight beam darts in every direction along the ceiling, looking for the place where he fell through, but he sees nothing but rocks and smooth, packed-in earth.

Tomas closes his eyes, swallows down the rising panic. He turns off the flashlight, because the darkness is a comfort somehow, and lowers himself shakily back down onto his knees.

Tomas clasps his hands in front of him.

He sways on the spot, eyes closed, dizzy with panic. Then he gives in, lets himself fall forward, pressing his forehead against the unseen dirt floor. Curled up, almost fetal against the ground.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” he whispers. His quiet voice sounds very, very loud in the underground gloom. “You are my refuge, and my fortress. Shelter me in Your arms, draw me into Yourself, and enfold me. Your grace and Your goodness have followed me all the days of my life, and You have been ever-faithful to me, though I in my wickedness have stumbled in my devotion to You. My faith . . . is a bastion, and You are it’s caretaker, Lord . . .”

He sniffs. wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. “I love You,” he finishes shakily. “If You want me to die down here, then let Your will be done. Amen.”

This final deed done, Tomas pushes himself to his feet. It’s cold underground, very cold. He imagines, in a moment of nervous whimsy, an angel at his back, but he feels nothing there. Only a gentle, heart-clenching warmth, as dim and easily snuffed-out as a candle flame. The same feeling he gets after communion, or a confession.

Tomas turns on the flashlight and starts looking around him, regretting not taking more from Cherry’s camper. He finds himself in a narrow tunnel, wide enough for three men to stand abreast, but no more. The walls are smooth earth, packed flat and tight. Tomas gives the wall a good thump with the flat of his hand. It makes a slapping sound like a goose’s foot on pavement.

The tunnel stretches out into the darkness in either direction. Tomas picks one, and starts walking.

He walks for a long time.

 

The walls get smoother, more densely packed, the further down Tomas goes. It reminds him of rabbit burrows, or the organized chaos of an anthill. It seems to him as though something has slithered through here, something organic. Sometimes he reaches a dip in the floor, full of a wet, viscous substance that’s pooled stagnantly in the little hollow. These he jumps over, though the third time this happens he slips on the rocks, and almost loses a boot to the quagmire.

The tunnels go down, and down, and down. His flashlight catches something gleaming distantly in the darkness, and Tomas runs forward, hoping against hope that it’s Marcus.

It’s not. It’s a thick white vein of crystal, running through the wall, perhaps two inches wide and three feet long. It splits the earth like a lightning strike, and when Tomas touches it, it’s cool and dry beneath his fingers. It gives off the faintest phosphorescent glow.

He finds other, similar crystals as he navigates the tunnels. Some are jagged, poking out from the wall as though to cut his hands. Some are smooth as glass, perfectly aligned with the hard-packed tunnel wall. Mostly they’re white, though a few are swirled with streaks of sunset orange, and one or two are pure orange, and seem to shine like fire under the beam of Tomas’ flashlight.

Tomas is just crouching to inspect one of them, running his fingers along the jagged surface of the stone, when he sees a light of an altogether different kind. A flashlight beam, flickering along the tunnel towards him.

“Tomas?”

The voice is rough and half-panicked and familiar enough to make Tomas’ heart soar.

“Marcus!” he yells, then claps a hand over his own mouth in sudden terror as his voice echoes down, down, down the tunnel, far too loud and far too sharp in the silent maze.

He hears a frantic _shh!_ as Marcus shushes him, and Tomas forces himself to hold still, watching as the distant light bobs closer to him. First at a snail’s pace, then a walk, then a run, until Marcus is _there,_ wrapped around him and shaking with relief, his hands gripping the back of Tomas’ shirt in a white-knuckled grip.

“Christ,” Marcus says with a nervous laugh. “You gave me a fright.”

Tomas squirms in his grasp, just enough to get his arms up and around him too, and they awkwardly lower themselves to the ground, still holding each other. Tomas presses his face against Marcus’ neck, his nose against the place where his jacket meets his neck, and says nothing.

Marcus’ hand comes up to cup the back of Tomas’ head, and Tomas thinks he might cry. “It’s alright,” he says shakily. “Just . . . focus on me. Focus on me, that’s it.”

“I thought I’d lost you,” Tomas says. His voice is muffled against Marcus’ skin. He can smell the sweat of him, mixed with the filth and the grit of crawling around underground.

“Hey now,” says Marcus. “It’ll take more than a fall to do me in, darling.”

Tomas laughs and pulls away from him, breathing easily for the first time since he’d fallen down into this wretched place. He wipes his eye with the heel of his hand. “I think,” he says, but his voice cracks in the middle and he coughs, has to try again. “I think I figured out where the Something is hiding.”

“Tell me,” says Marcus. He gets to his feet, and offers Tomas his hand. Tomas takes it, and even after he’s on his feet again, Marcus doesn’t let go. “It feels like I’ve been wandering this bloody maze for hours and I still haven’t the foggiest.”

“You’ve seen the rock formations? All the crystal veins?” says Tomas. “They’re leading further down. I’ve been trying to follow them.”

“What, you got a hunch and now you’re committed to it? Just like that?”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Marcus smiles ruefully, shakes his head. They make their way carefully down the tunnel, a more cramped fit now that their traveling together, but Tomas’ hand is clasped too tightly in Marcus’ and he doesn’t dare let go.

“You didn’t have to come down here,” Marcus says quietly, after the silence between them has become almost unmanageable.

“What?”

“We don’t know what we’re up against. We have nothing, not really,” he says. Tomas can hear the bitterness in his voice. “We shouldn’t have come here. Neither of us, but especially you. You’re not an exorcist.”

“We agreed,” Tomas says firmly. “We agreed that we were going to do this together. We made a deal.”

Marcus looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “Deals tend to go sour.”

“Not this one.”

Marcus gives Tomas’ hand a little squeeze, and tugs him further a long. It’s a straight shot for a while, although the tunnel slopes steeply upwards for a moment before trending back down again. When they reach the next fork in the tunnel, Tomas steps forward to shine his light down each passageway. Nothing but blackness at the bottom, and a smooth incline so steep that it would necessitate sliding down. The crystal veins in the walls glitter white in both.

“Fuck,” Marcus groans, his hand on his forehead. “This is getting us nowhere.”

They exchange looks. The thought that they should split up crosses Tomas’ mind, and is immediately disregarded as an impossibility. He can see the same flicker of doubt cross Marcus’ face. He wonders when he’d learned to read Marcus’ face so well.

Tomas swallows. “I say we go to the right.”

Marcus nods, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Alright,” he says. “You go first.”

Tomas, who is just about to lower himself into the tunnel, looks up at Marcus with a frown. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” says Marcus. “Yeah.”

He steps forward, puts his hand on Tomas’ shoulder.

“You can take care of yourself, Tomas,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before now.”

Tomas stares at him, at a loss for words. He can feel something hanging between them, a trembling silence that he’s afraid to break.

“Thank you,” he says, finally. “I needed to hear that.”

Marcus smiles. He crouches beside him, slipping his hand up to cup the back of Tomas’ neck. Tomas wonders distantly if he can feel his pulse.

“You really are a good preacher,” says Marcus gently. “I mean that.”

Tomas blinks slowly, tries to say something, anything in response, but before he even opens his mouth, Marcus’ lips are brushing against his jawline.

Tomas’ heart stops.

His arms seem to move of their own volition, encircling Marcus’ waist before pulling him closer, pressing him against Tomas’ chest. He’s so lean in Tomas’ arms, too light for a man of his size. Tomas wonders if he could pick him up, if Marcus would let him, but before can follow the thought Marcus’ kisses him _again,_ nibbling lightly at his throat, and Tomas thinks he might faint.

Marcus carefully cradles his head and lays him down, pressing his back into the earth beneath them. He moves overtop Tomas like a shadow, startling him with one knee firmly on either side of him. He presses their groins together slowly at first, then more insistently, as though seeking a warm, tight hole that isn’t there. His hands, all callouses and thick, clever fingers, are firm on Tomas’ chest as he holds him town. Tomas can feel Marcus’ breath, hot and damp against the shell of his ear.

“God, Tomas,” he sighs. “Fuck, I’ve wanted this.”

Tomas lets out a shaky exhale, and tries to say _so have I,_ but the words won’t come. He slips his hand over Marcus’ and peels it off him, tries to hold it in his hand and run his thumb over the scars as he’s so often longed to do, but Marcus extricates his hand from Tomas’ grip before he can. He takes Tomas’ wrist and pins it against the cavern floor. He continues sucking hungry bruises against Tomas’ neck.

“Marcus,” Tomas groans. He brings his other hand up, struggles to touch his own throat. He’s not wearing his collar today. He didn’t have time to put it on. But it’s there, it’s there even when it’s not, even when he can’t feel it, and when Marcus forces a knee between Tomas’ legs and presses it up against his erection, Tomas starts to panic.

He tries to slip his wrist out of Marcus’ grip, but Marcus holds tight. “I’m so _fucking_ tired,” he groans, his teeth grazing one of the new-blooming bruises on Tomas’ neck. “I haven’t slept for days, keeping you safe,” His lips move up, up, up, brushing Tomas’ neck with kisses until he reaches his mouth. “I need this.”

“We can’t do this,” Tomas says, breathing heavily. His heart is pounding a mile a minute in his chest. “I have my vows. So do you.”

The silence in the cavern is overwhelming. Tomas can hear only the sound of their mingle breathing, and the ringing of blood in his ears. Marcus’ mouth hovers just over his own. Tomas can almost taste him.

“I’m not a priest, darling,” says Marcus, into the silence.

“Let me up,” says Tomas. He tries to swallow the pain of the words. _Let me up. Not like this. Not like this._

“You owe me after all I’ve done for you, don’t you, Father?”

“Let me up,” says Tomas, his eyes narrowing.

He can’t see Marcus’ eyes in the dim cavern light. He sees a glint for a moment, and thinks he’s seen them, but it’s only his teeth.

 _“Pensé que eras un maricón, predicador,”_ he says bitterly, and Tomas seizes him by the hair and yanks his head back.

 _“I don’t know who you are or what you want but I know where you are going!”_ Tomas snarls, his leg coming up to slam against the thing’s belly. The False Marcus’ grip weakens, and Tomas forces him up and off him, slamming him into the ground and straddling him in his turn. His hands are fisted in the front of the False Marcus’ shirt. He can see his eyes, now. A brilliant, vivid orange, like a crystal in a cave wall, or a sunset seen from a porch.

White-hot anger burns through Tomas like a cancerous growth. He wants to vomit. He wants to kill something.

Tomas slams the palm of his hand down on the False Marcus’ face and presses it into the earth, all fear forgotten in favor of angry, guilt-ridden loathing. _“In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth,”_ Tomas snarls, the words spilling out of his mouth unlearned and untested, _“by the power of His cross, His blood and His resurrection, I take authority over the Devil and his magics, his blood tricks, his wickedness and deceit, his temptations and nightmare incantations that have tormented me. I break their influence over my life by the power of the risen Lord Jesus Christ, and I command these curses to go back where they came from!”_

Between his fingers Tomas can see the mad, rolling eye of the False Marcus. Not an eye at all, but an imitation of one, like the false spots on the backs of certain moths. The False Marcus is breathing in low, heavy wheezes, like dying roadkill. Tomas wonders how he could ever have thought this thing was human.

 _“I ask forgiveness for and renounce all dealings I have had with the Devil,”_ Tomas howls, _“and I ask You my Lord to release me from the bondage he has held me in. I claim Your blood over all aspects of my life, in sleep and in waking, in my parish and in my home! Eclipse my wickedness with Your enduring love!”_

He leans down, and snarls into the face of the False Marcus.

_“From dust you came and to dust you shall return, amen!”_

His hands, which had been planted firmly on the False Marcus’ face and chest, suddenly sink deep, deep into him, as though a great resistance had been removed and allowed them to plunge into the soft underbelly of the thing. Tomas scrambles back in disgust, struggling to see in the gloom, and looks down at his hands. They’re smeared with black ichor, dripping with it, not unlike that of the nightmare-serpent he had killed the night Marcus was in the lockup.

Tomas creeps closer, squints at the remnants of the thing. It’s softening, melting, dripping out into black ichor that pools across the floor. Its features are unrecognizable now. A tar-baby of a man.

Tomas forces his breath to slow, gives himself a moment for his heart rate to drop back down.

That had been an exorcism.

Or rather, something like an exorcism. The prayers that had spilled from his tongue were prayers of exorcism. He wonders if Marcus would be proud of him, had he heard.

Tomas’ hand shakily comes up to wipe his neck. He expects to flinch at the touch of bruises, but he feels nothing. He wonders if the bruises are fading already, along with the sticky remains of the thing that had left them. Already most of the False Marcus’ body has soaked into the earth.

Tomas does the only thing he can do.

He carries on.

 

Tomas prays over the decision for nearly five minutes before picking the right hand tunnel, hoping God will direct his steps. He lowers himself carefully down the smooth, steep slope of the tunnel floor, but there’s a sudden drop several years down and Tomas has no choice but to let go.

He lands hard, but he’s already broken and battered enough that he doesn’t feel it. Something crunches under him when he tries to stand though, and Tomas feels around blindly in the darkness.

He finds his flashlight, broken in his hands, and swears violently.

Tomas looks around him, blind in the darkness. A little voice in the back of his head tells him he ought to panic, but he doesn’t. The worst has already happened. Dying down here is of little consequence.

_Panic._

_I’m not panicking._

Tomas closes his eyes. This makes no discernible difference, against the darkness.

 _Father God,_ he thinks, _guide my steps._

He takes one step forward. Followed by another. And another.

Tomas holds one hand out in front of him and the other to his side, feeling for the walls. He finds it, and digs his fingers into the dirt as he walks, trying to leave furrows so he can feel his way out later. He keeps walking, and he doesn’t stumble once.

His hand out in front of him bumps a wall, and after a moment of patting around, Tomas realizes he’s encountered another fork on the road. He goes left without hesitation.

_Panic._

_I’m not panicking._

Tomas opens his eyes unto darkness. He feels his way forward blindly, and moves through the next turn, and the next, and the next.

_Panic._

_I’m not panicking._

 

It occurs to him that he’ll die down here.

There’s no way out.

 

There’s no way out at all.


	9. Chapter 9

Tomas cries when he finds a luminescent crystal for the first time in what feels like hours.

It’s one of the orange ones, projecting off the chunky rock face and giving off a faint, warm glow, like a dying ember. Tomas runs his hands all over it, making sure it’s there. He kisses the jagged surface, careful not to cut his mouth on it. He’s lost enough blood from bangs and scrapes against the wall.

It’s the work of a moment to press his foot against the wall for leverage and pry the crystal out. It’s about the size of a baseball, and Tomas cradles it carefully in his hands as he advances farther into the blackness. His feet ache, and his knees are weak from exhaustion. His mind, which had briefly sparked to life at the sight of that little light-giving crystal, has retreated back into the safety of numbness. He can barely remember why he’s here anymore.

Tomas catches himself speaking aloud once or twice. Talking to a Marcus that isn’t there. Then a phantom Olivia, then his grandmother. “Don’t be scared, Luis,” he says once, as he carefully picks his way across another sticky divot in the ground. “Our lives belong to God.”

It’s not long after he finds the first crystal that he finds a second. Then a third. Tomas picks up the pace, his breath catching in his throat. A fourth, a fifth, a dozen. The farther he runs, the thicker they’re growing along the walls. Like bioluminescent moss, so many that eventually the light from his little crystal seems insignificant. Tomas finds he has to start holding his arms close to his sides, and his pace slows considerably as he avoids touching the walls, for fear of tearing his skin.

The tunnel grows narrower, almost uncomfortably narrow, and that’s when Tomas hears it. The first sound he’s heard since coming down here, apart from the voice of a thing that looked like Marcus. It’s as soft and airy as a whisper. As light as a sour-sweet wind.

It’s the sound of a violin.

The tunnel begins grow wider and wider as Tomas moves towards the distant sound. The glow of the crystal illuminates the path ahead of him; he can see that it opens out up ahead. Opens out into a wide cavern, streaked with shadows and steady, orange light.

The music shrieks to a halt. Like a voice choked off mid scream. Numb to all feeling, Tomas barely notices. He tosses aside the crystal he’s picked up and steps forward into the chamber.

The first thing he feels is the cold.

The temperature plunges. His breath is like ice in his lungs; he breathes it out in thick puffs of frost. The ceiling is high, too high to see. Lost in darkness, with only the occasional orange crystal gleaming on the walls, like lit windows in the Chicago skyline. The higher Tomas looks, the sparser the crystals grow, but they are thick and numerous closer to the cavern floor.

Tomas wonders how far beneath the town he is. Then he remembers the way the roof had seemed to close over him when he fell. Maybe this is not the earth beneath Snakespring.

Maybe this is somewhere else.

Or a between place, halfway there and halfway not.

On the other end of the cavern, thrown into shadowy silhouette by the ambient orange glow, are two figures facing each other. Tomas recognizes one of them without seeing his face. The set of his shoulders, the crook of his arms as he folds them.

“Marcus!” Tomas cries out, and all the numbness of his journey through the tunnels seems to leave him; he feels his muscles twitch, his blood roar to life in his veins.

The other man turns to him, bow and violin held loosely at his side in one hand, and Tomas sees him. Knows him too. The Devil, looking just as he had in that first dream, that first night in Snakespring. He looks exactly as Tomas has always imagined the Devil to look.

“Preacher,” he says, his voice curling the word unpleasantly in his mouth. “You look like you’ve been sleeping rough.”

 _“Don’t!”_ Marcus yells at Tomas, he voice echoing off the cavern walls. The Devil twitches, the barest jerk of the head, and Tomas slams into the wall as though yanked by wires. His stomach is a hurricane in his belly, more sickening than a drop on a theme park ride. Tomas gasps for breath that doesn’t come, and struggles violently to move himself, to no avail. He’s affixed to the wall, arms spread, legs tight together. He remembers his dream- a scarecrow’s crucifixion- and shudders.

“Stay,” says the Devil. “The grown-ups are talking.”

He rounds on Marcus, who’s now standing with his fists clenched at his sides. He looks murderous. Tomas struggles harder against the force that holds him still, but all to no avail. He begins to mutter a prayer under his breath.

“What’s your little thrall doing here?” the Devil says coldly. He spits in Marcus’ eye, and Marcus flinches, ducks his head. “This is between us. Have you even told him?” He slips a book from his breast pocket, brown and hand-stitched, no bigger than his palm. “Have you even told the little prophet why you’re here?”

Marcus’ eyes flicker from the Devil to Tomas and back again. He doesn’t answer.

“I’m tired of this,” the Devil snarls. “I’m tired of you following me everywhere I go. A thorn in my side, a fly in the ointment. You think you’re new, or interesting, or worth my time? I have been going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it for a very long time,” He brandishes the book in Marcus’ face, like a hot-blooded preacher at the pulpit. “All this, for a boy you barely know? For a soul barely ten years old?”

Tomas can feel the earth moving, can feel his very _thoughts_ growing disjointed, as though his brain is an exposed muscle that the thing beneath Snakespring is trying to touch. It wants its lullaby back. It wants the Devil to continue playing. It needs to sleep.

“You think I’ll stop?” Marcus snarls, toe-to-toe with the Devil. “I won’t stop until I take back his soul. You know as well as anyone that _I don’t stop.”_

“. . . Who is my rock and my salvation,” Tomas is muttering furiously under his breath, straining desperately against the force that holds him still. “Who enfolds me in His wings, Who shelters me in His righteousness, Who . . .”

“Fucking hell,” groans the Devil, his head whipping around to stare at him. He raises his hand, poised to snap. “Do you fucking wetbacks ever shut up . . .”

“Don’t you _fucking_ dare,” snarls Marcus. Tomas drops like a dead bird from where he’s been lashed to the rocks, hitting the ground hard. He can feel blood seeping into the torn knees of his pants.

The Devil looks back at Marcus, momentarily distracted. His eyes flash terribly, his upper lip is curled off his teeth. Tomas wonders what Marcus sees in the Devil, what face the Devil wears to torment him.

“Keep your tongue behind your teeth,” the Devil says. “The only thing it’s good for is licking the boots of better men.”

He snaps his fingers, the snap that was meant for Tomas, and Marcus bends double with a choked off scream, his hands at his throat and his face white with pain. He knees hit the ground, then his forehead. He begins to cough black and red into his hands.

“Smoking’ll kill you,” says the Devil. He looks at Tomas with his arms spread wide, as if to say _eh? eh?_

Tomas is still on all fours by the wall, his knuckles scraped bloody and his knees doing little better. He manages to scramble to his feet and staggers forward, coming to a halt beside Marcus. Tomas puts his hand on him, feels him shaking. Marcus shaking under his hands. Hacking, rasping coughs, torn from him as though by force. His eyes are red-rimmed, dangerous as he stares up into Tomas’ face. He mouths something with bloody lips. It’s okay.

 _It’s not okay,_ Tomas thinks. _None of this is okay._

He looks up at the Devil, who holds out his hand to him, fingers raised to click. “Ah-ah-ah,” he says. “I can make you a leper with one hand, preacher.”

“I’m here to kill the thing beneath the town,” says Tomas. His voice is hoarse, but strong. “I’m here . . . on behalf of God.”

“Why didn’t He show up Himself, then?” says the Devil, with an irritated jerk of his head. “Funny how He never seems to show when I’m around. Maybe He’s shy.”

Tomas tries to stand up, but his legs give out under him and he hits the ground. The Devil looks at him with scornful eyes. “The preacher of Snakespring,” he proclaims with a sweeping gesture. “Wow. Some prophet you turned out to be. Some saint. I bet you don’t even have faith that your God will protect you from the diamondback rattlers next Sunday, poor ignorant fool.”

“I told you,” says Tomas, because if he says it enough times, he’ll believe it, “I’m here for God.”

“Don’t tell me you love God, and that’s why you’re here. This is a fool’s errand,” says the Devil. “You want to kill my child, who I birthed beneath the earth so many years ago?”

He looks over his own shoulder, down at the ground. _He’s looking at it,_ Tomas thinks desperately. _The thing beneath Snakespring. It’s there. It’s right there._

The Devil smiles. “No one can kill it,” he says. There’s something warm in his voice, almost like affection. “Only the imperfect can die, and there is nothing imperfect in it. It is flawless.”

Tomas raises his voice, a little stronger now. “I want to make a wager with you.”

The Devil laughs. “My boy, you’ve been reading too many dime novels.”

“I mean it,” Tomas says more insistently. “I’ll gamble, at any stakes you like, that I can kill the thing sleeping beneath this town.”

The Devil looks at him through half-closed eyes. “Come here,” he says finally.

Tomas stands up on shaky legs, carefully laying Marcus’ head against the ground before he does so. Marcus grabs at his arm, tries to hold him still, but Tomas tears himself away.

He approaches the Devil, walks right up to him until they’re almost nose to nose. At this distance, Tomas can see behind him. He can see that Marcus and the Devil had been standing near the edge of yet another crack in the earth, this one opening unto blackness.

The Devil’s eyes gleam like the teeth of the False Marcus. “If I agree to your wager,” he says, “what will you give me when you lose?”

“My life.”

“And?”

“My soul.”

The words are easy on his tongue. They have no weight, no meaning. Half of him believes the Devil won’t go through with it, that God won’t let Tomas’ soul be taken, but behind him, he hears Marcus groan in pain and frustration, and the Devil laughs.

“You’re just like that kid,” he says, “when he asked me to make his dad come home. _Gab-ri-el,”_ he enunciates, his fingers brushing his own breast pocket, where the book lies. “I’m afraid your going to have to give up a little more than that, preacher. Your soul is not a prize.”

“Mine.”

 _“Marcus,”_ Tomas hisses over his shoulder. _“Don’t.”_

“Mine too,” says Marcus, pushing himself into a sitting position. He can barely talk. His breath whistles through his throat like air through a straw. “My soul, along with his.”

He manages a crooked smile in the Devil’s direction before he coughs again, and the Devil smiles back. “Why not,” he says quietly. “Why not.”

The Devil looks back at Tomas, he turns his violin three times in his hands, and then it is gone.

“If you’ll wager three,” he says, “then I too will wager three.” He holds up three fingers, counts them off, one by one. “I will open the earth to the sky, so you may crawl out of this place alive. I will leave you the page of my book on which that whelp Gabriel’s name is written. And third,” here he clicks his fingers. He smiles when Tomas does not flinch. “. . . I will cure the lung cancer I gave your pet priest. How does that sound?”

“. . . We have a deal.”

“Good,” says the Devil, smiling widely. “Good.”

They shake on it.

Tomas feels the earth move beneath his feet.

He becomes acutely aware of the movement of the earth, of its rotation and path through space. How fragile the cord of gravity is, how easily it can be cut. He feels like no more than an insect, clinging to the underside of the earth’s skin.

Tomas squeezes the Devil’s hand tighter. He pulls him forward, whispers so only he can hear. “I see you,” he says. “You’re trying to make me feel small.”

 _It’s because he feels small,_ Tomas thinks, but does not say. The Devil bares his teeth at him in a half-grin, and gestures sweepingly towards the open cavern behind him, letting Tomas see for himself what he finds there.

Tomas looks down.

At first, he sees nothing. Only a crack in the earth, much like the one through which he’d tumbled what seems like a thousand years ago. This one is larger by far, with neat, jagged rocky edges. It plunges down, down, down into darkness. Tomas scuffs his shoe against the edge, dislodging a pebble, and watches as it falls. It falls a long, long way before it even disappears from view. Tomas kneels at the edge of the crevice and peers closer. There’s an unfamiliar quality to the blackness far below him.

“There it is,” the Devil says quietly.

Tomas looks at the blackness, and the blackness looks back at him. Then it dilates.

Tomas scrambles back from the lip of the crevice with a loud, pained cry. The pupil of an eye, unfathomably vast. Fixing him in its gaze. Merely the pupil of the eye is the size of ten men. Fear grips Tomas’ heart in a vice and clenches down.

Slowly, very slowly, he approaches the lip of the crevice again. He looks out over the edge, trembling. The darkness- _the pupil of the eye-_ is still looking back at him. This thing must be the size of Snakespring. This thing must be the size of _America._

Tomas look at it. He forces himself to lay it bare with his gaze, tries to understand it, connect with it in some way. He feels a great surge of overwhelming pity for it.

 _What are you?_  he thinks. _How do I kill you . . ?_

His eyes roll back in his head, and Tomas dreams.

 

_Darkness._

_In the beginning, there was darkness._

_Then from the darkness, Heaven. Then from the darkness, Earth._

_The Maker of things, and the unmaker of things. The earth rising up from the sea, or the sea shrinking back from the earth. And up from the sea, walking on God-given legs, comes the unmaker of things. That old dragon. The Devil. Papa._

_Years pass. Some years of silence, some of noise. None of it matters._

_The Devil births a child beneath the town. In the beginning, there was darkness._

_No breath. No air, nor light, nor thought. Bloodless and soulless. Sleep, says the Devil, and wake at the end of days, when I call for you._

_The baby is supposed to spin minds and cramp bellies._

_A plague thing._

_The Devil has no horsemen. The horsemen will be flesh and blood, anointed by God, for His entire stock and store is in humanity. Not so with the Devil, who trusts his affairs to no one._

_So the plague thing will lie here, and sleep. It will make snakes sometimes, and nightmares sometimes, and sometimes, it bubbles up with plague, and seeps into the houses, into the lungs of the children. But mostly, it sleeps. Waits for the white rider, for the thundering of white hooves upon the earth. He goes by Conquest. Pestilence. Pollution._

_And at the end of time, the thing beneath Snakespring will open its mouth and swallow him whole._

_This is what the Devil said._

_Tomas can hear him, scritch-scratching at the back of his mind._

_Whispering._

_Tomas is tired of the darkness. Let there be light, he thinks, and makes it so. From the darkness, Heaven. From the darkness, Earth. Tomas’ feet find purchase on the firmament of his mind. A firm place to stand. He regards the pitiful thing that has nested inside his brain, the little knot of snakes and shadows, and all the while, the Devil whispers._

**_I hate that you are here._ **

_Tomas crouches beside the thing. It looks so little now, as though Tomas’ imagination has proved too much for it. He’s swallowed it, made it small. It’s only the size of a rabbit, or a very small dog. Tomas can see bugs squirming in its depths. This is the thing laid bare. This is the thing made weak._

**_I hate that He isn’t content to send His angels to me. He has to use you animals, consensually, as if you’re worth something to Him. I know better._ **

_Tomas’ head begins to ache, as sharp as a migraine. He wonders dimly how that’s possible, if he has stumbled into his own mind- the thing’s mind- his own mind- the thing’s. A headache within a headache within a headache._

**_I know different._ **

_He doesn’t dare close his eyes. If he closes them, he knows what will happen. The world will explode into a thousand fractures, a thousand shards of light, and their fragile connection will be lost. Like a plug yanked out of an old television._

**_I know you’re worthless._ **

_The scratching at the back of his mind is becoming unbearable. Tomas forces himself to stay focused, to center his mind. To keep the pathetic little creature in his view, no matter what the Devil may whisper. His voice is echoing all around Tomas now, with the near-far sound of a badly tuned radio._

**_Your God might tell you different, but I’ve wised up. He can’t fool me with love. He’s selling something, preacher._ **

_Tomas imagines Marcus’ hand, tightly clasped within his own. It makes him feel a little stronger. He can almost feel his touch._

**_I am clear and unambiguous. I will love you insofar as you give to me, and when you have nothing left to give, I will cease to love you._ **

_The knot of serpents is darker now, more defined. Tomas feels as though he can see the creature clearly for the first time. It looks like the snakes at the church. The snakes he is expected to touch, every third Sunday. All tangled together and slithering over each other, in an old box that has held snakes in it since the days of Hephaestus Shaw._

**_That is business._ **

_Tomas reaches out, as though possessed. He can feel someone holding his other hand, holding it tight. He reaches out to touch the knot of snakes. “The lord has blessed me, brothers and sisters in Christ,” he says. He has not spoken the words before, but he knows them. “I do not run from death, nor do I allow it dominion over my life. I have been anointed by God, and God is in me tonight.”_

**_You’ll do nothing. You’ll accomplish nothing. Kill my child and I will birth another one seven times more terrible._ **

_“Glory to God. Glory to He whose plan is perfect, and undeniable.”_

**_You fool. Do you think you have what it takes-_ **

_“Glory to He who spared St. Paul-”_

**_-to be the preacher of Snakespring?_ **

_“-from the bite of the serpent, and Glory to He who will now do the same for me. And so it is.”_

**_Don’t._ **

_Tomas puts his hand against the knot of serpents. He plunges it in deep, up to the elbow, and draws out the wickedest serpent he can find._

_Red, red, red. Red with one wide, rolling eye._

**_Don’t._ **

_Tomas holds it up, his fingers closed around it. “I hold death,” he says, “in my very hands. I hold it. And do I die, brothers and sisters in Christ? Has my God forsaken me?”_

**_Please don’t kill my child._ **

_Tomas clenches his fist._

_The thing beneath Snakespring pops like a burst vein._

 

Tomas’ senses return to him one at a time.

He’s first aware of the ground beneath him. No longer stone, but soft, muddy earth. He can feel the rain soaking him, feeling like pinpricks of ice against his cuts and scrapes. His head is pillowed on something soft.

Then he hears Marcus praying. Quietly and sincerely, and too indistinct for Tomas to hear. Toms tries to listen, tries to make out the words, and he must make some sort of noise when he does that because Marcus stops at once. Tomas feels Marcus’ familiar hand cupping the side of his face.

“Wake up,” Marcus says gently, but Tomas can hear the tremor in his voice. The hand against his face is cold and clammy. Tomas doesn’t try to move away.

Tomas opens his aching eyes. He blinks, tries to bring the blurry world into focus. He brings a hand up to rub at his eyes, trying to lessen the sting. “Are you okay?” he mumbles.

Marcus lets out a nervous laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

Tomas sits up, and as he does so, he realizes his head had been in Marcus’ lap. “Where,” he says, but that’s all he gets out before the simple motion of sitting up makes him dizzy. He sways a little, leans his chin heavily on Marcus’ shoulder.

“Was it real,” he groans, almost too tired to care. “Was it real, or was it all a bad dream . . .”

Tomas can hear the thrum of Marcus’ voice in his chest as he says, “Whatever it was, it’s over,” He cups the back of Tomas’ head with his hand, lets him lean on Marcus’ shoulder as long as he likes. “He’s gone away . . . he’s gone away . . .”

Tomas blinks lazily at the walls of the pit. Dull and muddy, not a crystal in sight. Above them, the rain pours in, soaking their skin and making their clothes cling to their bodies. It looks nothing like the cavern he remembers, nothing like that awful underground labyrinth.

“It feels like waking up from a nightmare,” he murmurs. Marcus mumbles something in agreement. His hand is fisted in the back of Tomas’ shirt. Tomas can feel him shaking, and he knows it’s not from the cold.

“Can you breathe?” Tomas asks, laying a hand flat against Marcus’ chest. He can feel the swell of his lungs, deep inside him. In, and out. In, and out.

“Can you stand?” Marcus asks back, and Tomas braces his hand against Marcus’ shoulder, uses it as leverage to push himself to his feet.

Tomas stands and looks up at the gray sky, yawning above them. He spreads his arms wide, lets the rain flood over him, down the plains of his shoulders and into his eyes, his mouth, his nose. He feels clean.

The pit in which he’s awoken is shallower than the fast cavern. It could be scaled with ropes. Without them, it will be more difficult, but after the ordeal of the tunnels, Tomas feels more than equal to the task.

“Look,” Marcus says sharply. There’s something new in his voice, something Tomas doesn’t recognize. He looks down to see Marcus scrambling across the mud, towards the crack in the earth that had once held the thing beneath Snakespring. It looks so much smaller now. Little more than a hole in the ground.

Tomas joins him at the lip of the crevice. It’s shallow now, the bottom easily within reach. There’s something pinkish and leather there, being pelted by the rain. Marcus snags it, pulls it up and wipes off the mud.

“Look,” he says again, and Tomas realizes Marcus is on the verge of tears. He tries to smooth out the thing in his hand, but his hands are shaking too badly to do it. Tomas takes it from him, smooths it out on his knee. “He left it behind,” Marcus says, wiping his nose with the back of his wrist. “H-he followed through. The wager, he . . .”

Tomas looks down at it. A small, flat square of leather hide, old as sin and thin as paper. There’s a name on it. Burned into the skin, as though writ with a red-hot pen.

Marcus head is bowed, his hands over his nose and mouth. He’s shaking. “Eighteen months,” he whispers hoarsely, as Tomas puts his hand on his back, rubs small circles between his shoulder blades. “Eighteen months I’ve been following him.”

Tomas hands him the little skin-page. Marcus takes it and holds it as gently as a baby bird. “Go on,” Tomas says gently. “I’ll pray with you.”

He nudges his forehead against Marcus’ temple, and lets him take all the time he needs before he begins. _“Almighty Father,”_ Marcus prays. His voice cracks on the second word. _“You are my shelter, and my refuge. Grant that the soul of this boy may, through the intercession of the Virgin most chaste, Mary, and all of the saints, come to share in Your eternal kingdom.”_

 _“Grant to him eternal rest,”_ Tomas murmurs. _“Expunge his name from the Devil’s book, and let him be delivered from the torments he endures.”_

_“Let Your perpetual light shine upon him, Father. Bless him, and bless us. Keep us from evil, and bring to us the knowledge of life everlasting.”_

_“Amen.”_

_“Amen.”_

As one, they look down at the scrap of skin in Marcus’ hands. He turns it over, and over, looking for the name.

There’s nothing there. The name is gone, as though it had never been written.

Tomas presses his forehead harder against Marcus’ temple and _laughs._ Laughs like a kid who’s almost died, laughs like a dead man walking. Marcus laughs too, and his starts small and manic until it bubbles up out of him in a big happy bark that makes Tomas laugh more, and then their arms are around each other, squeezing like they want to break each other’s ribs. Marcus tries to wriggle away, spluttering some nonsense about Tomas’ arms could strangle a horse, and Tomas holds tighter and tells him he’s not letting go for anything, and the rain is cold, cold, cold, but neither of them feel it.


	10. Chapter 10

They follow the carnage home.

Marcus’ arm slung around Tomas’ shoulders, Tomas’ around Marcus’ waist, laughing like idiots as they stagger stickily through the mud. The storm overhead shows no signs of letting up. Tomas cranes his head to make out anything besides the ugly gray clouds. The rain blinds him, and he ducks his head again with a smile.

“This is never coming out,” Marcus says, gesturing at his trousers. They’re stuck to his legs with blood and wet dirt, and Tomas laughs because they almost died, and Marcus’ clothes have never been clean anyway.

“We should burn them,” he says. “Burn all of them. Burn everything.”

“Look,” says Marcus, the levity in his voice suddenly diminished.

He points at the deep tire treads in the road as they cross it towards the house, from where Cherry and Lester had booked it back to town. In the muddy lot outside Tomas’ house, they find another set of furrows. Bennett’s car had pulled away, gone back towards town as well.

Tomas sets foot on the first step of the porch. It creaks under his weight, and all at once, the magnitude of what they’ve done descends on Tomas like a storm. He feels acutely aware that the Tomas ascending these steps is not the same Tomas as the one who last went down them. Marcus’ arm is heavy around his shoulders, his hand clenched tight in the shoulder of Tomas’ shirt. Tomas keeps walking.

The door is cracked slightly open still, which is good, as Tomas realizes after patting himself down that he did not bring his keys. They make their way inside, shivering from the rain and tracking mud across the threshold, and Tomas flicks the light switch back and forth. _Click click click._

“Fuck,” he says quietly, but with great intensity. “The power.”

He hears Marcus groan in the darkness next to him. “The shower’d better work.”

“It will,” Tomas says dejectedly. “Ice cold, though.”

He feels his way carefully into the kitchen, his fingertips seeking out the sink, then the cabinet beneath it. He digs up a pair of old battery lanterns and flicks one on and off. It shines with a weak artificial light that doesn’t quite touch the corners of the room. Tomas turns them both off again, and sets them on the counter.

He can feel Marcus moving in the darkness, though he cannot see him.

“We’re going to lose all the food in the fridge,” Tomas says

Marcus chuckles weakly. “After what God did through us today, you’re thinking about the food.”

“It doesn’t feel real,” says Tomas. He tries leaning on the counter, but the wood is sharp against his bruised arms, so he refrains. “It feels like a nightmare.”

“A nightmare we woke up from.”

Tomas can hear the creak of Marcus’ leather jacket, very close to him in the dark. He can feel the warmth of Marcus’ skin. The low, slow inhale and exhale of his breath.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Marcus doesn’t say anything.

“I’m not okay,” Tomas admits.

He feels Marcus touch his arm, and wonders if the skin of his shoulders have learned the shape of Marcus’ hands.

“You were fucking incredible,” whispers Marcus. Tomas reaches up to grip his wrist.“I’m sorry I didn’t do more. I’m sorry . . . you didn’t need me.”

“You did everything,” Tomas says fiercely, squeezing Marcus’ wrist tighter. The medal on his bracelet cuts into Tomas’ palm. _“Everything.”_

His eyes are beginning to adjust to the darkness. He can make out Marcus’ face more clearly now; the lines around his mouth, his downcast eyes. Blue like new denim.

Marcus’ breath is warm and damp against his cheek.

_Alive._

Tomas breaks. He seems to spill into Marcus’ arms, his fists clenched tightly in the back of his dripping wet jacket. Marcus’ arms are around him at once, pressing him closer as though to envelop him completely. His hand cups the back of Tomas’ head as Tomas sobs into his shoulder.

Tomas sniffs wetly and presses his nose against Marcus’ neck. He doesn’t care what he looks like anymore, not under the gentle anonymity of darkness. He can feel Marcus’ breath coming fast and unsteady, and realizes with a jolt that he’s crying too.

They let the moment run its course. It’s Tomas who calms down first, his eyes still stinging as he starts running his hands up and down Marcus’ back. When Marcus’ breathing finally steadies he’s the first to pull away, cupping the back of Tomas’ neck in both hands and pressing a scratchy kiss to the bridge of his nose. Another on his forehead, and one more on each cheek.

Tomas’ heartbeat is ringing in his ears. Not even the storm outside can drown it out. Their lips brush lightly together, almost incidentally, and Tomas’ eyes open wide as Marcus’ mouth moves more insistently against his own.

Tomas closes his eyes and leans into the kiss, and it’s like something long missing has at last been restored to him. It’s easy, so easy, to hold Marcus close and press their chests flush against each other. Tomas’ pulse has barely quickened, and his breath comes warm and regular. _At last,_ he thinks, _the rest of me._

Their lips part, and Tomas tilts his head up to press their foreheads together, bumping noses. This too is easy. He puts his hand on Marcus’ neck and kisses him lightly on the mouth, just once. Then again, at the corner of his mouth, lingering there for a moment before kissing his cheek. He slides his hand down to squeeze Marcus’ scarred shoulder, hoping he knows, feels somehow, how dear he is.

Marcus looks at him like he’s seeing him for the first time. Tomas can feel his every breath when their chests swell against each other. A smile ghosts across Marcus’ face when Tomas nudges his chin with his knuckles. “Would you like to sleep in my bed tonight?” Tomas asks gently. “The Devil will trouble us no longer.”

“Your vows,” says Marcus. Tomas knows the words have been waiting on the tip of his tongue.

“Sleep,” Tomas repeats. “No more than that. That’s not a sin.”

Marcus lets out a half-hysterical sob. “I’m so tired,” he says in a strained whisper, covering his eyes with one hand. His voice hitches as he says it. “I’m so tired, Tomas.”

“I know,” Tomas murmurs, between gentle shushes. “I know, I know.”

They linger there in the kitchen as Marcus’ shuddering breaths subside to peaceful exhalations. He looks at his own hands and seems to shrink into himself, as though repulsed by what he sees. “I have to shower,” he mutters.

“Ice cold.”

“Yeah.”

Tomas lets Marcus pull away from his embrace. He watches in silence as he takes one of the lanterns and disappears down the hall, and into the bathroom. The sound of the rain catches up to Tomas all at once; he can hear it lashing against the windows. A moment later, and the rain is joined by the sound of running water.

Slowly, Tomas follows.

Marcus has set the lantern on the sink in front of the mirror, to better maximize the light. Tomas can see him silhouetted behind the shower curtain, soaping himself up. He pauses when he hears the creak of Tomas’ boots on the bathroom floor, then, slowly, he continues washing. Tomas closes the door behind him and begins to undress.

It’s like shedding a layer of skin. His shirt sticks to him and has to be roughly peeled off, and the jeans are almost painful stiff when he forces them down. Marcus has shoved his clothes into a muddy pile between the sink and the toilet, so Tomas crumples up his own and adds them to the heap. His skin prickles with goosebumps at the thought of the cold water. Nonetheless, he pulls back the curtain and steps inside.

Tomas shrinks away from the water immediately; it’s far too cold, cold enough to burn. He draws the curtain closed around them and holds his hand out under the stream, letting his skin grow accustomed to the chill.

He can see Marcus’ face at last, bathed in the light of the lantern. His head is tilted up against the water, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. Tomas can see every line in his worn face, every scar.

The water sluices off him black and filthy, and when Tomas moves forward through the cold, he blackens the water too. He wraps his arms around Marcus’ waist and kisses his back, his lips soft against the knobs of Marcus’ spine.

He can feel Marcus move his hand back, lightly touching Tomas’ bare thigh. He turns around in Tomas’ arms, careful not to slip, and lathers up his hands with one of the oatmeal soaps on the shower shelf. Marcus lifts his chin, holding eye contact with Tomas, and Tomas takes the hint and mirrors the action. He stands as still as a scarecrow, and lets Marcus run his hands up the column of his neck, up into his thick hair and back down. He runs his hands over Tomas’ shoulders, squeezing them as though checking an apple for ripeness, before moving down his arms. Tomas schools his face into a neutral expression and flexes his bicep under Marcus’ hand. Marcus laughs- _laughs,_ God, Tomas wants to wake up to that laugh- and slips his hands across Tomas’ skin to run them down his spine.

They’re chests are snug against each other now, the water slick between them. Tomas feels out the rough, uneven ridges of Marcus’ scars with his fingertips, touching his shoulder, his back, the worry-lines of his mouth. He lathers up his hands with as much soap as he can and kneels beneath the shower spray, his knees aching against the wet shower floor. Marcus makes to kneel too, but Tomas stops him, so he braces one hand against the shower wall and closes his eyes as Tomas reaches up to run his hands down Marcus’ chest.

He lingers at Marcus’ pecs for a moment, cupping them in his hands, before moving further down and beginning to soap up his belly. Tomas thinks of Marcus out in the yard, sweating in a summer afternoon. The sight of his pale belly, and the dark tan of his hands. Scars gleaming white in the setting sun like veins of silver.

Marcus’ cock is hanging soft between his legs, and the sight of it makes Tomas’ breath come shallow. He looks up at Marcus, a silent question, and when Marcus gives him a tremulous nod Tomas leans forward and kisses the place just above the base of Marcus’ cock, where the wet blond hairs are just beginning. He kisses him with all the reverence of a man kissing the Pope’s ring, and when he stands up to hold Marcus again, Marcus reaches behind him blindly and turns the shower knob till the water cuts out.

They stand shivering in each other’s arms.

Tomas steps out first, dripping onto the bathmat and immediately reaching for the nearest towel. Marcus follows, red-faced and cautiously grinning.

The towels are soft, heavy cotton, and at Marcus’ wordless request, Tomas lifts his arms like a child and lets himself be dried. Marcus hesitates only once, the towel lingering at Tomas’ thighs, and Tomas spreads his stance a little wider so Marcus feels welcome to dip the towel between his legs and dry him there too.

Marcus holds him for a moment, pillowed on the soft cotton, as though testing the weight in his hand. Then he lets go, and lets Tomas dry him, lingering between his legs in the same way. When they’re dry, Marcus kneels on the bathroom floor, and gestures mutely for Tomas to lift up his foot.

Tomas does, carefully, and Marcus’ hand slips underneath to cup the arch. The cotton is soft against the pads of Tomas’ feet. Marcus’ fingertips skim his heel, then his anklebone, as he dries. Tomas stares down at him, his mouth slightly open and his heart in his throat.

Marcus dries Tomas’ other foot in the same way, and Tomas takes the towel from him. A moment, a wordless gesture, and then it’s Tomas kneeling. He runs the towel gently down Marcus’ legs first. He can see the fine, almost invisible blond hairs, and the tight, pink burn scars where the hairs don’t grow anymore.

Tomas’s fingertips skim the underside of Marcus’ knee- _up, please-_ and Marcus lifts his foot into Tomas’ hand. Tomas rests its sole against his bare thigh and dries it with the towel, now damp. The other follows in turn, and only then does Tomas stand.

They regard each other in the lantern light, naked and dry. Tomas’ hand twitches, aching to keep touching, and Marcus must see it because he reaches out and clasps it, squeezing Tomas’ hand in his own.

Tomas takes the lantern off the sink and turns to leave the bathroom, but Marcus’ hand tugs him back. “Wait,” he whispers, in a very small voice. “I don’t feel clean yet.”

Tomas bumps his nose against Marcus’ cheek. “Then we’ll keep going until you do.”

 

They make their way up the attic stairs in silence, except for a murmured, “Be careful of the splinters.”

Tomas’ lantern fills the attic space with bright, artificial light. He clicks it off once they’ve reached the top of the stairs, plunging the room into a heavy and comforting darkness. Tomas can make out only the barest of shapes in the darkness as he pulls back the blankets from the cot. A burst of lightning fills the attic with light, outlining Marcus’ dark silhouette against the windowpane. Then the light fades, and the attic is dark again.

Tomas lies back on the mattress, the springs creaking dangerously beneath him. His exhaustion threatens to overtake him at once; his eyelids are heavy, his bruises, a painful nuisance. He can feel, rather than see, Marcus’ presence beside the bed.

 _Please,_ he prays in silence, _I can’t be alone tonight_.

The springs squeak as the mattress dips beneath a sudden weight. Tomas scoots a little to the side, arms spread and undemanding, and when he feels Marcus lay his head heavily against his shoulder he thinks he might cry.

Tomas takes Marcus’ hand in his own and kisses the dips between his fingers. “Sleep,” he says, very gently, as though nudging a loved one toward prayer.

Marcus nestles himself against him, just under Tomas’ arm. His hand runs through Tomas’ chest hair before resting over his heart, and Tomas can feel Marcus’ cock lying soft against his thigh.

Tomas doesn’t close his eyes until he sees Marcus close his first. He presses his nose against the top of Marcus’ head, breathing in the clean, familiar smell of his hair. Marcus’ breath comes quiet and even.

 _I love you,_ Tomas mouths silently into Marcus’ skin. _Good night._

And together, they slip into sleep.


	11. Epilogue

Father Tomas Ortega is the most interesting thing to happen to Snakespring in years.

Everyone has something to say about him. Andy Kim says Tomas has visited him in his home every day for the past week, to pray with Shelby and to help Andy through his convalescence. People ask him where the bruises came from, the new scars on his chest and arms, but Andy shrugs it off. Accidents around the farm, he says. Late at night, he sits by the window and stares out of the corn, and wonders where the bruises and scars really came from.

Dr. Bennett, who knows something about everything, says Father Tomas is a good man and an even better preacher. He’s leaving town- to Maria Walter’s private delight and everyone else’s agitation- but assures them that he’s leaving them in good hands. When Grace trips and twists her ankle on the pavement outside the soda shop, Andy calls Bennett to help patch her up. He does, and he even smiles at Grace while he does it, but Andy doesn’t understand why Bennett won’t shake his hand.

Opinions varied widely among the congregation of St. Raphael’s when the new preacher came to town, but in time, he has endeared himself to them. They like his passion at the pulpit; he speaks as though every sermon is his last. His handshakes are firm, and his smiles are warm. He walks like he has an army of angels at his back.

The general consensus is that the town has been good for him, and he has been good for the town.

On the third Sunday, there are whispers and mutters among his congregation. It’s a hot, bright morning, and the sunlight through the stained-glass windows of St. Raphael’s makes the glass too hot to touch.

Tomas stands before his congregation, in his robes and his collar. The church is silent; the held breath before the exhale.

“The Lord has blessed us, brothers and sisters in Christ,” he says.

“Amen!” cries his congregation back at him. Tomas hears one voice louder than the others, all the way in the back, and he smiles.

“We do not run from the Devil,” he says, “nor do we allow him dominion over our lives. We have been anointed by God, and God is in us this morning!”

The words have changed, ever so slightly. There are a few hushed murmurs- _that’s not how the old preacher said it-_ before the dissent is quickly swallowed up by a second, louder, “Amen! Amen!”

“Glory to God,” says Tomas. He steps up to the pulpit, where The Box is waiting for him. Old wood and dirty glass, behind which he can hear the hissing. “Glory to He whose plan is perfect, and undeniable. Glory to He who spared St. Paul from the bite of the serpent, and Glory to He who will now do the same for me.”

“Hallelujah, amen!”

“And so it is,” says Tomas. He slips his hand inside.

He takes the first snake that touches his fingers- a diamondback rattler, thick and grayish and almost prickly to the touch- and holds it up into the light. It coils in his hand, and slides between his fingers. It’s heavy and awkward to hold, threatening to drop at any moment.

It raises its head a little, as if to warm itself in the sun.

“I hold death in my very hands,” says Tomas. He knows he ought to feel fear, but he doesn’t. “I hold it. And do I die, brothers and sisters in Christ?”

“No!”

“Has my God forsaken me?”

“No!”

Tomas looks out over his parish, seated before him. Some eyes are on him, but mainly they’re on the serpent. The flickering tongue, the twitching tail.

He sees Andy sitting two rows from the front, week-old bruises fading on his neck and cheek. Grace is sitting next to him, slumped against his side. Her mouth is open, drooling a little as she snores. Andy puts his arm around her and kisses the top of her head. Lined up next to him, Tomas can see the rest of Andy’s kids, all bored by the speech, but nonetheless interest in the snakes. All except for Shelby, who has his Bible open on his lap, and his eyes fixed on Tomas as he holds the serpent before the crowd.

Not far behind Andy, he can see Mrs. Graham, sitting primly in her Sunday best. Harper, pale and sickly, is sitting next to her. She keeps glancing behind her, waving furtively at Sheriff Morrow, who’s sitting directly behind them. He smiles at her, and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly when Mrs. Graham hisses for her child to hold still. Harper giggles, hiding her mouth behind her hand.

“Our town is blessed by God,” Tomas says, his voice echoing loud. “God has made a covenant with us, in this place, that we may hold unimaginable dangers in our hands, and yet feel no fear, for the Lord is with us.”

“Amen,” says the crowd, one final time.

Marcus is sitting all the way in the back, his legs up on the empty pew in front of him. He sees Tomas looking at him and raises his hand in a lazy half-salute.

Tomas smiles, then hurriedly stifles the smile with a look of solemnity. He lowers the snake back into the box, and carefully slides the lid shut over it. “The Devil holds no sway over this town,” he says, coming out from behind the pulpit to stand before his congregation properly. “Nor will he ever, as long as our hearts are true, and our faith is in our Father. Please rise.”

Then the creaking, rustling, shuffling noises of dozens of pews being emptied at once.

Tomas raises his hands, bows his head. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” he intones, and the church echoes the words in response.

 

Tomas doesn’t see Marcus for most of the day. He takes confession, as is customary. He blesses, forgives, and absolves. He holds hands and he dries tears and he drinks too many cups of watery coffee. By the time the afternoon is drawing to a close, he has checked his watch a dozen times, and finally he asks Tara if she won’t mind closing up St. Raphael’s herself today.

“Oh,” she nods in understanding, getting up from her desk. “Is that today?”

“It is,” says Tomas, running a hand through his hair. “I promised I’d help him pack.”

“Lord, this is all so sudden,” Tara says. She fiddles with one of her bracelets, a thoughtful look on her face. “Did he . . . did he say anything? About why he’s going? People . . .” She leans in a little and lowers her voice, although they’re alone in the church. “People don’t really leave this town.”

 _I’m going to chase the Devil,_ Dr. Bennett had said, bruised and bloodier and happier than Tomas had ever seen him. They’d been in his sitting room when he’d said that, Bennett in his armchair and Marcus and Tomas slowly sinking into the too-soft cushions of his couch. Marcus had told Bennett that he’d gone mental, and Bennett had told Marcus that he was perfectly well, and Tomas had sat silently, sipping sweet tea and saying nothing.

“I don’t know,” Tomas lies, shrugging into his jacket. “Maybe he just felt like it was time he moved on.”

“Say goodbye for me,” says Tara, and Tomas agrees that he will.

He leaves her to close up the church and makes his way to Bennett’s house, his hands in his pockets, his boots kicking up dust with every step. He finds the place looking somehow different than when he last saw it; still dark and stately, but empty-looking. Tomas feels a twinge of sadness, seeing such a fine house left empty.

Bennett’s car is parked out front, the doors open and the trunk popped wide. Tomas sees Marcus picking his way carefully across the lawn, two heavy-looking suitcases threatening to overbalance him at any moment. Bennett is standing on the porch, watching him with a bemused, cat-like look.

“There you are, preacher,” he says pleasantly as Tomas approaches him to shake his hand. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it in time to see me off.”

“Thought I’d have to lug all these by myself,” Marcus says breathlessly, leaning against the car. Bennett tsks, and Marcus stops leaning with a scowl.

Tomas leaves them to talk on the porch while he goes inside, hefts the last of Bennett’s bags. Bennett, as it happens, is not a light traveller. “I’d carry them out myself,” he says, watching Tomas stagger past him out to the car, “but I’m afraid it’s impossible. My leg, you see.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Marcus with a grin. “Don’t suppose your leg will stop you from vagabonding across the country in search of the Devil, now will it?”

Tomas stacks Bennett’s briefcases in the backseat. There are three of them, all polished black leather and heavy silver locks. Tomas wonders what they could possibly contain, what could be so important that Bennett was willing to drag them halfway across America. He realizes, as he regards the briefcases stacked neatly in a row, how much he doesn’t know about Bennett. How much he’ll never know, now that he’s leaving them.

Behind him, he overhears Marcus say, “Sure you don’t want to take my bike? I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” and a little, private beat of happiness thrums in Tomas’ heart.

Tomas straightens up and stretches, his hands at the small of his back. He feels old now, when he moves. His bones ache, and his bruised skin creaks in protest. But the week-old injuries have already begun to heal, and Marcus assures him he’ll be right as rain in no time. _Learned this from an old medicine woman down in Louisiana,_ he’d said, as he’d rubbed poultice into the deep cuts on Tomas’ calves. The pain had made Tomas squirm, and Marcus had held his ankle tighter, soothed him with a pat on his knee. _If you don’t hold still, I can’t heal you._

Tomas looks at Bennett slyly out of the corner of his eye, and stifles his grin. If Bennett knew that Marcus had tended to his wounds with bayou remedies he would’ve had a conniption. As it stands, he looks as calm and collected as ever, chatting with Marcus on the front porch of his home. Occasionally he glances up at the building, as though committing it to memory. Tomas approaches them.

“It seems that you shall have to find a new doctor,” Bennett is saying, having presumably refused the motorcycle on account of his leg and luggage. He’s leaning on his cane, but Tomas can see his thumb tapping restlessly against the wood. He looks up at the house again. “I am going to miss this place. Though I imagine Maria Walters will be thrilled to hear I’ve gone.”

“You sure you wanna do this, mate?” Marcus says gently.

Bennett nods with no hesitation. “I’ll miss this place,” he reiterates, “but I have been stagnating here too long. I told myself there was nothing in the world to interest me.”

He glances at Tomas with a narrow-eyed, flinty gaze. Tomas stares steadily back, and after a moment, they both smile and look away. “Then I met the Devil,” Bennett continues. “And, well . . .”

“Love at first sight?” says Marcus, and they have a good laugh at that. Tomas realizes he’s never heard Bennett laugh, not really. It’s a quiet, dusty thing, too long out of use. Tomas thinks of birdsong, heard for the first time only after a long-closed window has been opened.

“Someone has to keep him on his toes,” says Bennett cooly. “Frankly, beating him senseless was the most fun I’ve had in a lifetime.”

He shakes first Tomas’ hand, then Marcus’. He goes to open the driver’s side door, and Tomas has a sudden, mad desire to grab his arm and ask him not to leave.

“Stay safe,” says Marcus. He strolls forward, puts his foot up on the polished chrome fender, and scrapes a dirty bootprint across it. “For good luck,” he says, grinning.

“Charming,” says Bennett drily, about to slide in behind the wheel, but before he can, Marcus catches his arm.

“C’mere,” he says. “We’ll do this proper.”

Bennett gets out again, and they stand, all three in a circle, heads bowed. They pray, each in their turn; Marcus and Tomas pray for Bennett, and Bennett prays for Snakespring. Then they clap him on the shoulders, Marcus taking care to wrinkle his suit as thoroughly as he can, and they watch as Bennett gets behind the wheel. The car roars to life, and they watch it pull away and start making its way down the road. Out of town. Away from Snakespring.

Marcus watches him go with his eyes squinted against the Western sun, his hat tipped low over his face. Tomas sidles up to him and presses their shoulders together, as if to say, _you and me, against the world._

“You want to follow him, don’t you,” he says.

Marcus says nothing.

“I don’t want you to go,” says Tomas, “but I won’t stop you if you do. I know you were made for wandering.”

They watch as the dust kicked up by Bennett’s car begins to dissipate in the air. The sun is hanging low in the sky now, bathing the reddish-brown and dusty-gray houses of Snakespring in a warm orange glow. Tomas is reminded of the orange crystals in the place-not-a-place beneath the town. The way he had cried when he had found one again after so long in darkness.

Marcus shakes his head. “No,” he says softly. “No. I may have been made for wandering, but that’s not all I was made for.”

 _What God joins together, no man can separate,_ Tomas thinks, but does not say. Instead, he steals a kiss, quickly so as not to be seen by Bennett’s neighbors. He knows Marcus’ mouth more thoroughly than he knows his own. “Come on then,” he says warmly, looping his arm in Marcus’. On a whim, he takes Marcus’ hat and puts it on, tilting it rakishly over one eye. “Let’s go home, _pardner.”_

Marcus laughs until his sides ache, but he lets Tomas keep the hat, and together they walk towards the setting sun and they don’t stop till they get home.


End file.
